João stars in a biopic about Liberada, a gender-nonconforming figure persecuted by the Inquisition. After the director is mysteriously paralyzed, João faces haunting dreams and struggles to honor Liberada’s story.
Signifier and signified, representation and presentation, character and actress, fact and fiction, figure and legend, flesh and spirit, description and re-enactment, objectivity and subjectivity, history and spectrality, research and invention, film and video… The list of epistemological polarities could go on for a long time and would still fail to guide us through the maze of mirrors that Paula Tomás Marques has set up in Two Times João Liberada. Based on an investigation into the Portuguese Inquisition’s trials of people who, in retrospect, would be understood as ‘gender dissidents’, the director proposes a kaleidoscopic self-reflection on the past, its contemporary revisitation and the limits of its (cinematographic) portrayal. Actress, character and ghost coexist and clash in a post-modernist exercise where the ‘film within the film’ satirises and questions the problems of mythification and historical speculation. This is a playful and iconoclastic meta-film about the ephemerality of the past and the impossibility of its representation. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
