Encontros

Pierre-Marie Goulet
,
PT
,
2006
,
HD
,
105'

Betoverd door de liederen van de inwoners van Peroguarda in de zuidelijke Portugese regio Alentejo, bezochten respectievelijk de jonge Portugese dichter António Reis, de Corsicaanse onderzoeker van Portugese volksmuziek Michel Giacometti en filmmaker Paulo Rocha het dorpje in de late jaren 1950. Encontros probeert een stam te omschrijven die bestaat uit klanken, muziek, poëzie en mensen; een analoge en buitengewone stam die niet behoort tot enig geografisch gekend territorium. De film verweeft verschillende hedendaagse en voorbije bijeenkomsten tussen mensen en herinneringen. Door die vervlechting worden we aan het denken gezet over hetgeen waaruit we zijn gemaakt en over hoe het geheugen, de manieren waarop anderen ons zien en de geste van het delen ons verrijken.

After finishing Polifonias, a film dedicated to Michel Giacometti, the desire was born not to lose everything that had been offered to me throughout the shooting and that I had not used in the final editing: songs, narratives, poems that were recorded and whose memory risked being lost if they were not integrated in a new project. There was also the desire to follow some of the paths that had been indicated to me during this time: that of the visit of António Reis, then still a poet, to the village of Peroguarda in Alentejo, the very same place in which Michel Giacometti wished to be buried, and others I wished to visit for my own reasons, such as, for example, to approach Paulo Rocha’s film Mudar de Vida, which fascinated me particularly by the interaction between the narrated story and the end of the fishing communities of Furadouro. Little by little it became clear what, beneath the surface, constituted in my mind one of the faces of Encontros: the echo of the past, of a time gone by, of a culture which had died out, but an echo one hears in the present and which resounds in its appeals. It thus became a question not of deploring what has disappeared, not of making a nostalgic return to the past, or bringing fragments of the past into the present, but of letting go of memory to make way for the living.” (Pierre-Marie Goulet)

 

Portuguese spoken, English subtitles