Ana

EN

“Where are we in Ana? In Portugal, since the filmmakers are Portuguese. But this small country is still too big. In the North of Portugal, in the region of Miranda do Douro, where Reis and Cordeiro have already shot a film a few years ago, another wonderful and unclassifiable film called Trás-os-Montes. Here and nowhere else. Here and anywhere else. Because the strength of Ana, which discourages in advance all lazy classifications, is just that. It’s been a while since a film has reminded us so clearly that cinema is at the same time an art of the singular and the universal, that images float so much better if they dropped their anchor somewhere. Ana-fiction? Ana-documentary? This distinction is really too crude. Documented fiction? Not even. Fiction means putting oneself in the middle of the world to tell a story. Documentary means going to the end of the world not to have to tell. But there is fiction in documentation as there are insects in fossile rocks, and there is documentation in fiction for the good reason that the camera (it cannot help itself?) records what you put in front of it, wherever you put it. Ana-end of the world? Ana-midst of the world?”

Serge Daney1

“Watching Ana was a great emotional experience. It is a film that elevates the spirit, with a sensitivity, a finesse and a very particular poetic conception of the image. All the strength of the film is already in the synopsis:

In those days…
The legend of the milk in the somber house.
Inner time.
Almost silence.

More than a legend, it is a tale, a secret dream that haunts us long afterwards.”

Joris Ivens2

Yann Lardeau: How is the work divided? What is the share of each, and is this visible in the final product?

Margarida Cordeiro: There is no leadership, I think we start from dissimilar places. Sometimes. But when we start shooting, we’ve already agreed. During the work itself, we never disagree. We debate a lot, we talk about. But when filming, we’ve already reconciled – even when there are widely divergent positions.

António Reis: When there are small differences without consequence, we have enough awareness of each others’ creative activity, so we don’t need to explain our point of view.

Cordeiro: We’re very different. António says we have very different personalities, very complementary. When we work, it’s as if we were a single individual. But our sensibilities are very different.

Reis: There’s a contradiction that defines us well. In Portugal we say, “What in me feels, thinks.” I think Margarida and myself think what we feel, feel what we think.

Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis in conversation with Yann Lardeau3

“Some will say that this is a film in which nothing happens, in which there is no plot. The same people would say the same about Plato’s dialogue, the Odes of Pindar, or in Camões’s Babel e Sião. ‘Ah, frailty of human fate: / that in degree as life passes, / plays herald to death.’ ‘To play herald to death,’ from Homer’s Ulysses to that of Joyce, has been the sole and utmost purpose of storytelling. Ana is, among many other things, a film about comprehension of this fact. If it persists after viewing in one’s memory, this is because its domain is not that of memory, ‘but rather of reminiscence.’”

João Bénard da Costa4

• 1This text was published in French in Libération on 8 June 1983. [Translated by Stoffel Debuysere]
• 2Joris Ivens, cited in the 2025 Courtisane Festival catalogue.
• 3Yann Lardeau, “About Ana. António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro interviewed by Yann Lardeau (1983),” in In the Midst of the End of the World: António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, eds. Stoffel Debuysere and Raquel Morais. (Ghent: Courtisane, 2024), 50-51. Originally published in French as “A propos de Ana” in Cahiers du Cinéma 350 (August 1983). Translated by Stoffel Debuysere.
• 4João Bénard da Costa, “Miranda: Miranda: The Unwoven Tunic,” in In the Midst of the End of the World: António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, eds. Stoffel Debuysere and Raquel Morais. (Ghent: Courtisane, 2024), 47. Translated by Lisa Leak.