MONTEMOR

The film starts at dusk. A low angle shot of a landscape shows a figure
slowly pushing its way towards us through a clump of brushwood and
thickets. We are in Montemor, a small place in the portuguese countryside,
right in the heart of the country – a place Ignasi Duarte picked up as the set
of his first movie. We won’t learn anything about this village and its striking
sites of interest though. Ignasi Duarty chose to use different ways or channels.
Are we witnessing somebody’s arrival? No, even better, we are faced
with somebody’s descent, somehow reminiscent of Alice’s descent into her
hole.
This is a peculiar place full of ghost-like characters arising from nowhere,
such as this sculptor infatuated with frogs or this man coming from Africa,
as he points out in a compulsive monologue summoning God. They are
followed by musicians, a procession we can hardly glimpse through the
depths of the forest. Are these people living in the village? The main question
asked by the film goes beyond that. At this point, we realise we are in a
comedy as we find ourselves escorting the main character, a mute, almost
crazed looking figure, whose wanderings provide many occasions for
enigmatic encounters, full of movements with unfathomable purposes:
picking up, humming, sculpting… and waiting. The film doesn’t mean to offer
any explanation, its purpose is to show a whimsical and somehow fantastic
distortion of reality through this piece of land and the few figures passing
through, with History looming between the lines. (NF)