“Fogo do Viento,” director Marta Mateus’s debut film, brimming with magical ideas but subtle in its anthropological scope, demands a lot of cinema.
Taking more than four years to complete, the film lacks neither ambition nor a sense of brevity, clocking in at just 70 minutes. Both qualities lend the film a special intensity and focus.
like diverse When I sat down with Matthews at the Locarno Film Festival, where this enchanting debut premiered in the main competition, she immediately insisted that she sees her filmmaking career as “a kind of WorkshopThe film itself is more of a carefully crafted piece of art than anything else, which only serves to reinforce Matthews' point.
The stillness of the camera in the film helps create this feeling. Craftsmanship In every shot. “A filmmaker once said to me, ‘Oh, I made that movie where the people never move.’ What was he talking about? Then I realized that maybe he had that feeling because the camera actually almost never moves.”
This sense of composition suggests that Matthäus owes more to the tradition of painting than to anything cinematic in particular. “I studied many things, but not cinema,” she says, standing under a tree in a park in Locarno. “I didn’t want to study cinema, because I knew that was what I wanted to do, so I thought I wouldn’t let anyone tell me how to do it.” Matthäus studied philosophy, theatre and music—a bet that in the future, tools from different disciplines would feed into her vision of the art of filmmaking.
The sun, shot in broad daylight, plays a central role in Matthäus’s forest-set film. It beats down on winemakers toiling in the fields and creeps through the leaves as workers seek shelter from a wild bull hiding in the branches. As we spoke, Matthäus recalled in detail the difficulty of working with natural light that is constantly changing and never waiting for any man (or woman) to capture it. Time and again, Matthäus and her crew return to the same spot, searching for truth in every shot.
“I care a lot about the images that come to mind. When you shoot for a long time, you store those images in the back of your brain. Maybe another image comes to me while I'm shooting, and I have to rewrite the narrative, but we filmmakers have to accept that that's the way things are.”
The shifting light is the most obvious sign of transience in Fogo do Vento, but Mateus’s work is more than an expression of embodiment and moment. He always leans into the physical reading of what has passed, and seems to evoke history with every shot.
“Fogo do Viento” is concerned with the concepts of community, nation and struggle, and is an independent work of art in its own right, operating on both the intimate and historical levels.
“There is a whole world inside each one of us. We all carry this connection to history and we are responsible for it,” says Mateus. The images from the colonial war in Africa that Maria Catarina, the main character, presents to the viewer, or the character of João de Encarnação, the director’s great-grandfather, who haunts the film as a young soldier from the Great War, suggest the eternal presence of the ghost of history.
But the film goes beyond national narratives to play its part in the larger confrontation between images. “I also wanted to think about how banal the image of war has become lately,” says Matthews. As political conflicts mount, cinema can provide a counter-image to the violence that the media promotes.
“History is also built on images. We have to understand what images we want to keep because images of war create images of war. Film has to disrupt that flow, to be an ally of the humanity we generally don’t care to look at.”
The film takes place in an almost sacred ancestral region – the Alentejo in Portugal – which allows for symbolic imagery to intervene. A dangerous bull stalks the fields and forces peasants and workers to climb trees, giving new meaning to the idea of shared solidarity.
“I grew up in Portugal in a remote place, where oral tradition is still very important. Storytelling, myths and legends were part of our daily lives,” says the director.
This personal experience thus intertwines with the film’s ritualistic approach to history and the possibility of breaking the chain of suffering—the hope for revolution and liberation. “The sun is very old, very old, very old. Much older than the foundation on which we built our history.”
Decades ago, militant cinema relied on images that shocked, aroused tension and forced the viewer to take a stand. But Matthäus chose a different approach, a different resistance: a subtle way of understanding the power of the shot, a sparse pace and a rhythm of semi-chanted dialogue that evokes how oral cultures interpret the world, far removed from the linear way contemporary capitalism understands things.
“I think cinema plays a very important role today, but in a very unconscious way. It has a symbolic power, it stimulates our imagination in a way that we are not fully aware of. Cinema can be a driving force and it can also give us a new conscience about something – an emotional and sentimental feeling. In doing so, it creates something new. How and why a film affects you is also important,” she says, urging viewers to let her film speak for itself.
