The young film student Maria do Mar is working on a documentary about the old manor houses along the Douro River. It is her thesis on Reality in Cinema. The last house she visits it’s a more isolated house, hidden between the vineyards. She’s enchanted by everything that seems genuine and, in her opinion, true. Until one day. Her touching candour leads her blindly to the depths of horror.
‘You only look once (…)’ notes of Maria do Mar in a notebook that collects thoughts from a process that records and weaves its web of images of the Real in Cinema. Maria do Mar (a name that awakens the Portuguese cinematic imagination) moves around a manor house, the setting for a search and an encounter with its inhabitants, with animals, with things, with music and images. The gaze is multiplied in perspectives, live nature, secrets, pianos, desires and many pulsating waves are framed. A film within the film, and even more films, and the cinema circulating. Innocence and sin, voyeurs and dramatists converge in Hands on Fire in a dizzying mise en abîme. – Carlota Gonçalves
