Marta Mateus’s two wonderful films—Barbs, Wastelands(Farpões, baldios), her 2017 twenty-five-minute debut, and her 2024 feature Fire of Wind(Fogo do vento)—are both set in the rural Alentejo region of Portugal where she grew up. Amid the beauty of the rural landscape, Mateus focuses her attention on the precarious lives of agricultural workers. Their stories of endurance and resistance are communicated through a combination of portraiture and poetry evocative of the alfresco recitations in the later works of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Mateus’s cinematic style and approach are also inspired by the work of Portuguese filmmakers Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis, and she will present three of their films during her visit this November.
Cordeiro and Reis’s profoundly influential body of work was made in the years following Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution and the end of more than four decades of dictatorship. Their feature films Trás-os-Montes (named for the remote Portuguese highlands in the northeast of the country) and Ana (which also takes place there) explore the day-to-day realities, chores, and rhythms of life in the region with a cast of nonprofessional actors drawn from the dwindling population of the area. Tethered to specificities of the place, Cordeiro and Reis use cinematic tools to travel seamlessly through layers of time and history. This film series provides a special opportunity to engage with these fascinating works in conversation with a contemporary director they inspired.
—Kate MacKay, Film Curator
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive -- BAMPFA
2155 Center Street
Berkeley, California 94720
U.S.
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2155 Center Street
Berkeley,
California
94720