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“The evocation of a province in northeastern Portugal, where historical and secular roots intertwine with those of the neighboring village, united by the river Douro. The children, the mothers, the women, the old people, the home, the land. Every-day life, bizarre happenings, handicrafts that are disappearing, susbistence farming. Erosion. Time and distance. The presence of those no longer present, of all those who have gone on towards other horizons. A poem inspired by Trás-os-Montes region and interpreted by its inhabitants“. (António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro) In the province's poorest and most rugged of Portugal, the authors have devoted one look more accurate and poignant ever written on this earth. “Trás-os-Montes“ is a pantheistic and earthy film, landscape and culture where ancestors are sacred covered in a pilgrimage imagery that retrieves the size of the myth in every gesture, every ritual or each saga. The thin narrative thread of the film is mainly intended to further enhance the magical side of characters and landscapes, people with an ancient wisdom and ancient roots. Hardly suitable to any kind, or any other film (except, perhaps, Paradjanov, revealed much later in the West), “Tras-os-Montes“ is as much an act of faith in what has been called “popular culture“ as a scholarly re-creation of that culture. Primitivism and modernity merge in the vastly anthropological cinema of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, marked by a discreet yet dreamlike, a Jungian symbolism and a total belief in the power ressurgidora arts. “Tras-os-Montes“ surprised and disparate mixed reactions: on the one hand, his commercial career was strongly supported by the criticism in a campaign almost “terrorist“, on the other seemed to represent the limit point of a movie completely divorced from “spectator comuperfila.
