THE LAND'S WEIGHT. Trás-os-montes, October 1999. Nature is as beautiful as it is cruel. The land’s weight falls down on the men of this cold land. Hard land, rocky land, barren land, their only hope for food, only place of death. The land leaves wet the bones, its smell penetrates in the hands and everywhere it smells of potatoes, that cold, humid odor that pleases and gnaws. The potato eaters move around with their bent bodies and tough walk as if from the weight of the land, the work to take the bread from the quiet ground. It takes a long time before we see a house threaded in the landscape, constructed with the same rock of the land; dark rock, accustomed to the sacrifice and madness, the violence and the illness, the cry and the death.  In this place the joys depend on the land, the frost, the rain in the good time, on the arrival of somebody, someone who has left and comes back to their land, because this is their land.  The land frees and imprisons, compels one to leave. Men and women leave voluntarily; abandon with homesickness its land courageously, advancing in the ravine for a unknown world, complex, but full of faiths and hopes. The ones that are still here are convicted to stay in the direful solitude of sleeping in abandoned villages, to wait, to receive from the land and to die in the land.

Trás-os-montes, a poor region in the north of Portugal.

2 trips, one on the summer, another on the winter time, searching for people and songs.

Bruno, 8 years-old ‘sings with the tapes’. Deolinda ‘walks with the cows’ and show us the village cemetery that ‘has a lot to see’. Ti Ana, 90 years-old, sings songs by the fire with the neighbors who ask her to ‘sing another one’. Oral tradition songs, learned from her mother and grand-mother, sang in ‘mirandes’ a local dialect. The songs tell us tragic stories that might remind one of Shakespeare.

 

I shot this documentary in 1999 but just finished it in 2006. I always thought I would go back there one day. What I shot in 1999 I thought would be the first step in my research, not the entire film, but I never went back there. It is a project that I was dedicated to, so I decided to look at the footage I had with an open mind, trying not to think about what I wanted to do by then, but just watch what was actually in the images.

I was surprised how things made sense. My affection for the persons I was shooting with and the respect I felt for those were in the images and it already had an inner flow. This was the first time I felt my images were so clear, sharp, with everything right inside. And I could listen to those songs forever… there’s something primal and essential in them, in the way people live and relate with the landscape, the Nature, the fire…

with

Ti Ana

Deolinda

Bruno

 

and

inhabitants of Trás-os-montes

 

direction, image, montage and production

Cláudia Tomaz

 

sound

Nuno Carvalho

 

Production

NO BUDGET FILMS

 

Support

Icam – apoio à pesquisa e desenvolvimento de documentário

Câmara Municipal de Miranda do Douro

ContraCosta

Temple University, Filadélfia, EUA

 

Shot in mini DV - Final format DV Cam

Sound: Mono

 

Shot in 1999, edited in 2006