Raw Material was filmed over a year in the Interior Douro region. Through testimonies from local communities, the film reflects on different, at times conflicting, notions of value in relation to the landscape and how practices of cultivation, preservation and extraction benefit and impact the people who live there. A film that explores ideas of what is contained but not immediately visible within the land.
Rocks as an alphabet, the raw material that writes the text and composes the book of the soil, or, more precisely, the history of the Earth. A history intertwined with our own. In Raw Material, James Newitt observes the layers that make up this living archive, examining both the exploitation of natural resources (such as lithium extraction) and the forms of intimate relation between the bodies that inhabit the territory.
Between agriculture, geology and mining, labour and affective relations, Newitt chooses to listen without exposing: testimonies, whether from surveyors, geographers or rural inhabitants, appear almost always without a face, shifting the focus towards matter, rocks, mineral particles, tools and sound. By capturing the extractive gesture alongside a possible sense of communion, blurred boundaries emerge: someone unwell confuses their body with the soil and calls not a doctor, but an engineer of the land.
Positioned between the experimental and the documentary, the film constructs a space of sensitive excavation which, little by little, reveals an unsettling portrait of the region and of the materiality that constitutes us. (Susana Santos Rodrigues)
