ANA

At the center of ANA — António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s sublime second feature — is Ana, an elderly matriarch portrayed by Cordeiro’s own mother. She cares for her family in the far-off mountains of Trás-os-Montes. As her grandchildren grow to perceive the outer world, their inner life evolves; meanwhile, Ana grows sick and her death looms. A series of nonlinear scenes resembling reminiscences and rituals, with dialogue from poems by Rilke, ANA manifests a link from individual experience to the collective toils of people throughout the ages, and from the collective to the earth, all wrapped up in the cycles of life, death, and renewal. Keyed to the resonances of footsteps and whispers, the film sustains the atmosphere of a chamber piece, even as it opens to vast landscapes, and to eternity.

“A flash-back of five thousand years. This is how Joris Ivens describes the scene in ANA where an ethnologist relates the ancient customs of Trás-os-Montes with those of ancient Mesopotamia. It’s about an internal look at a land whose inhabitants are geological deposits and in whose landscapes, filmed as if they were cities, there doesn’t appear to be anything anonymous: each tree, each track, each stone could have its own name. Chant to a land, two women, a name, a language; precise dreams and transposed nightmares during the day.” - CCCB