TRÁS-OS-MONTES

António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro masterpiece exploded the meaning and possibilities of ethnographic cinema with its lyrical exploration of the still-resonant myths and legends embodied in the people and landscapes of Portugal’s remote Trás-os-Montes region. Evoking a kind of geologically subjective time, with past and present layered upon one another, TRÁS-OS-MONTES interweaves evocative recreations of the ancient worlds and encounters with atavistic peasantry, following the pilgrim’s path traced by Reis and Cordeiro as they led their skeletal crew from village to village in search of the poetic essence of the Portuguese language and imagination. Reis and Cordeiro painstakingly researched and shot TRÁS-OS-MONTES over the course of one year, becoming intimate with every person included in their ambitious film, carefully selecting the different voices, faces and gestures that would together provide an extraordinary composite, associative and mythological response to the question of how to define a “national cinema.”

"A film of long shadows and smoke in twilight, TRÁS-OS-MONTES is an intensive labor of recollection, an epic of a land and a way of life on the edge of oblivion. As an act of solidarity with a people facing extinction, TRÁS-OS-MONTES echoes through time." - Edward McCarry