Four film critics, accompanied by the discreet presence of a director, analyse the origins of their cinephilia. The May 3 screening will be followed by a discussion with invited guests after the film.
How is a country’s cinema defined? By its filmmakers, by the images and sounds (or lack thereof) in its films, or by what is said or written about them? Júlio Alves, in his persistent quest to understand the cinema produced in Portugal, following the magnificent Sacavém and Diálogo de Sombras, once again turns his gaze to the materiality of cinema, to the physical objects that become a machine of light and project images onto a screen for the viewer. Four film critics are invited to comment on their first images, whether drawn from memory or experience, or even from the origins of our own cinema. And the result is surprising because suddenly the critics speak of their first images as emancipated spectators, which foreshadows the fact that they will become critics in the future that is our present. Alves’s camera, ever attentive, anticipates gestures or perceptions that we will only understand later and places their memory at the service of our own memory as viewers. This is a film that reflects us back. It is me, it is you; each of us identifies with what we hear, and perhaps we can understand that going to the cinema or watching films at home, on a television or a streaming platform, is a gesture as commonplace as the meals we have eaten. But when these images become ingrained in us, perhaps the future will tell us that cinema will one day come knocking at our door. Vasco Câmara, Inês Lourenço, Ricardo Vieira Lisboa and Luís Miguel Oliveira are Júlio Alves’s guinea pigs and our alter egos. (Miguel Valverde)
