El espejismo, The Mirage

It’s spring, and mirages have been reported along the coast of Spain. Anne (Constance Rousseau), a young French woman, travels to the island of Santa Clara to witness these visual aberrations. Afterwards, on the ferry to the neighboring city of San Sebastián, she meets a mysterious older Portuguese woman (Rita Azevedo Gomes) burdened with an unusual picture and stranger story. The woman, Margarida, tells Anne of her youth in the city of San Sebastián, where she (Francisca Alarcão) had lived with her sister, Maria (Maria Novo). The sisters were very close, their lives often eerily mirroring each other’s. However, after Maria glimpses a beautiful young man from afar, her fixation on him creates a widening breach between the sisters, and reveals a gaze capable of turning the world inside out.

In The Mirage, a continual, ambiguous shifting of point of view and perspective opens an intersubjective space, one that belongs to each of the four protagonists and, at the same time, to none of them. This is the territory of the film, where past and present, reality and representation are set in constant tension to create a simultaneously physical, emotional and perceptual landscape. The film develops a dynamic, athletic mise en scène based on elaborate, extended sequence shots – a mobile camera describing the actors’ varied traversal of San Sebastián, in the process investigating the potential of the space and reinventing it before our eyes. Made with few resources, the project nonetheless strives to dare modest miracles, feats of belief in what small, dedicated crews are still capable of. The Mirage is, on some level, about cinema, its supernatural power. More than that though, it is a film about our fascination with the process of looking, not just at works of art, but at the world and each other, about vision as a creative act that transforms both subject and object. It is about how we relate to one another, about whether we ever see the same things, and how we can hope to communicate them. I hope that the film will speak to viewers on these terms, and many others.