As seasons change over the course of a year, a square in the center of Lisbon shifts. Repetition is observed through the four windows of a street kiosk.
Madalena Fragoso worked at the Praça das Flores kiosk for a year and, during her shift, she used her smartphone to film the day-to-day life of the neighbourhood. As Flores looks at the kiosk space as a filmic dispositif: anchored in space, facing outwards, central and panoramic. Thus, from static shots (almost entirely shot from the inside) that circulate around the circumference of the pavilion, the director stages a kind of inverted panopticon, a watchtower for everyday events. Figures reappear, gestures are repeated, routines are established, as well as their disruption – the tarmacking of the street, the painting of a letterbox, the pruning of trees, a police raid, tourism. This is a choral portrait (as centrifugal as it is centripetal) of a place, understood as a microcosm of (co)existence. But there’s also a spectre that haunts this square: cinephilia. João César Monteiro lived there and Fernando Matos Silva is still around. In As Flores we spy on banality and let ourselves be haunted by absence. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa
At the director’s request, the screening on May 7 • C.406, will not have descriptive subtitles in Portuguese.
