Nineteenth session of the film programme Manoel de Oliveira e o Cinema Português 2, with the screening of Manuela Serra's "O Movimento das Coisas" (1985), presented by the professor and filmmaker Francisca Dores.

O MOVIMENTO DAS COISAS

Manuela Serra | POR | 1985 | 90'

Stories of silence and the everyday. Through deserted paths of disquieting wind on a Northern village. There is a day's work crossed by three families: four old women, the field, the bread, the chickens and (reminding us) old stories of gestures, savoured in mineralogical words. A family of ten children on a farm delves into the width of time, in the gesture of work, as the father cuts a tree. Far away, the waters of the river, in which people sail on a small boat, the sun, and the village's center, an under-construction bridge, the balcony, the meal, the density and mysticism of sunday, the mass and the fair: ritualized at saturday. Isabel moves around these fragments of settings, her eyes on her future, beyond the future of others, whose meaning of life is simply to live. Time crosses from sunrise to sunset. It is to breathe life, using the fields as the place of a Northern village, full of old, ponderous gestures.