Week 45/2025

Trás-os-Montes by the Portuguese duo António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro is an unclassifiable piece of ethnographic fiction about a remote region in northern Portugal. Far removed from the capital of Lisbon, time appears to pass differently in the small villages that are connected through myths haunting the mountainous landscape. The way in which Reis endows daily life with meaning through well-chosen cuts and precise framing would inspire many Portuguese filmmakers in his wake, not in the least Glauber Rocha and Pedro Costa. Before the screening at KASKCinema, filmmaker Sakis Brönnimann will give an introduction.

Belgian filmmaker Annik Leroy is Artist in Focus at CINEMATEK all through autumn. Given carte blanche to pair her films with works she admires, this week she has chosen for us Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring’s Fluchtweg nach Marseille (1977). The essay film follows the trail of German emigrants who fled to Marseille during WWII. Its plot is structured around Anna Seghers’ novel Transit, in which the German-Jewish writer fictionalizes her experience of exile in France. Retracing her journey, the film dialogues with the book, bringing it to life as actors recite its passages. Through archival material, interviews and poetic images of contemporary France, the film evokes “flashes of the past in the present”, to use the famous words of Walter Benjamin, also a German exile who attempted to escape through Marseille.

The last pick of the week is a special one. Fallen Leaves is Isabelle Huppert’s film of choice to accompany her State of Cinema, organized by Sabzian and Bozar on the 9th of November in the Henry Le Boeuf theatre. Melancholy and hope are not mutually exclusive in Kaurismäki’s simple yet humorous tale of love and loneliness in modern-day Helsinki. In his signature stylized, almost cartoonish aesthetic, the Finnish director follows lost souls as they stumble through life, treating them with sympathy and tenderness. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Huppert and French critic Jean-Michel Frodon.

Fluchtweg nach Marseille
Ingemo Engström, Gerhard Theuring, 1977, 217’

Documentary in two parts that blends dramatized reconstructions, personal reminisces and newsreel footage to tell the story of the flight of German refugees through occupied France to Marseille in 1940.

EN

“The theme of the film is the escape route of the German emigrés in France in 1940/41. It describes a research of the past against the background of landscapes and towns which once were scenes of persecution. The leitmotif of the journey is Anna Seghers’ novel Transit. The principle of progress and discovery: the eloquence of photography in motion. The film closes on the image of an unkown woman of the Resistance. She died with a bullet throught her head on the 1st August 1944, on the same day as the writer Jean Prévost. Both fought in the maquis of Vercors. The film is dedicated to the landscapes of the resistance. 

[...]

Finding a connection between a work situation (1977) and a material (1941) was both easy and difficult. The intersection point was quickly established as an idea. But the researches, deliberations and inventions needed to do it justice were all the more hesitant, even though enjoyable. In order to take the material seriously, the first requirement was to turn away from it, to initiate one’s own choices. Passages had to be regarded as quotations and as nothing more. The marketing of literature in outdated cinematic forms has been something we have despised for quite a few years. Film adaptations were the bad habit of the TYCOONS who dominated the film industry, the genre of hollow filmic packaging, empty shells of speech and costume. Money to make money. So there was that too – an act of opposition to the traditionally permitted routine.”

Ingemo Engström & Gerhard Theuring1

  • 1Ingemo Engström, Gerhard Theuring, “Escape Route to Marseilles,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 18, 1982, 23–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44111864.[/fn]

screening
CINEMATEK, Brussels
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
Trás-os-Montes
António Reis, Margarida Cordeiro, 1976, 108’

The first feature in António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s trilogy is a journey through this almost mythical region of north-east Portugal, a tapestry of micronarratives where past, present and future become intertwined. Developed with a limited budget during the filmmakers’ holidays and free time, Trás-os-Montes was initially intended to portray different aspects of this culturally and geographically unique region – from flora to local crafts and architecture. However, the film turned into something entirely original, complicating straightforward definitions of documentary and ethnography. Rather than attempting to crystallise the region’s objects and practices, the directors reinvent its sounds and images, inaugurating a new chapter in Portuguese docufiction. (ICA)

EN

“For me, this film reveals a new cinematographic language. As far as I know, a director has never committed, with such obstinacy, to the cinematographic representation of a region: that is to say, to the difficult communion between men, landscapes, and the seasons. Only a foolish poet could produce such a disquieting object.”

Jean Rouch1

 

“I can tell you that we never shot with a peasant, a child or an old person, without having first become his pal or his friend. This seemed to us an essential point, in order to be able to work and so that there weren’t problems with the machines. When we began shooting with them, the camera was already a kind of little pet, like a toy or a cooking utensil, that didn’t scare them. So using their lights in their homes or setting up reflectors in the fields to have indirect light wasn’t a problem. It was a sort of game at the same time. So it was possible to insist on certain things, most often with tenderness. And if we were having a problem, they understood very well. A very important thing: they were able to confirm from our work that we were also ‘peasants of the cinema’, because it sometimes happened that we were working sixteen, eighteen hours a day, and I think that they liked seeing us working. And when we needed them to continue working with us, even while leaving the animals without food or the children without care, they didn’t feel, I think, it was a constraint. It was admirable to see this."

António Reis2

NL

“Verwijdering is het onderwerp van de film die António Reis en Margarida Cordeiro hebben gemaakt in de streek van Trás-os-Montes (waaraan de film zijn titel ontleent) in 1976. In de dubbele betekenis van het ver zijn (ballingschap) en de daad zelf van het (zich) verwijderen (uit het zicht, vervolgens de vergetelheid in). Verwijdering, zeggen Reis en Cordeiro ons beetje bij beetje, is de geschiedenis van het noordoosten van Portugal. Het is de verre heerschappij, onbegrijpelijk en zonder inlevingsvermogen, van de Hoofdstad (Lissabon) over Trás-os-Montes. Zozeer dat de Wetten, uitgevaardigd door de Hoofdstad, de boeren niet bereiken en dat deze zich de vraag stellen: bestaan ze eigenlijk wel?”

Serge Daney1

  • 1Serge Daney, “Ver van de Wetten (Trás-os-Montes),” vertaald door Elias Grootaers en Veva Leye, Sabzian, 18 mei 2016. De tekst verscheen origineel in Cahiers du Cinéma n° 276, mei 1977.
screening
KASKcinema, Ghent
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
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