19. UNDER|DOX 10-16 OKT

The sun plays a primary role in Mateus’ forest-set film, largely shot in broad daylight. It bears down on wine workers toiling in fields and sneaks between the leaves of the cork oaks. A dangerous bull stalks the fields and forces the peasants and workers to clamber into the trees, giving new meaning to shared solidarity.
The film is rooted in an ancestral, almost sacred territory – Alentejo in Portugal – allowing for the intrusion of symbolic imagery. Photos dating back to the colonial war in Africa that Maria Catarina, the main character, offers to the viewer, or the figure of João de Encarnação, the great-grandfather of the director, haunting the film as a young soldier from the Great War, further suggest an eternal presence of the specter of history. – Lucía Requejo, Victor Morozov