New Moons: Maria Inês Gonçalves

There’s an enigmatic intimacy to the young girls—the twins—at the center of Maria Inês Gonçalves’s The Blue Pajamas (2017) that we sense almost immediately after they enter the frame. They wade into their family’s pool, its blue waters darkening as dusk falls, and dunk each other’s heads under the surface—but who is whom? Their long hair and thin frames make them nearly indistinguishable, and when they emerge from the pool to groom themselves before a bathroom mirror, one can’t help but recall similar instances of doubling before the looking glass—most famously, perhaps, the unsettling, vaguely erotic scene in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, in which Bibi Andersson and Liv Ulman seem to bleed into one. By contrast, Gonçalves’s giggling girls, Helena and Sara, appear to relish in their sameness. When one of them asks if the other would consider confessing a secret—to their mother, perhaps—the answer reveals a desire to preserve their unity: “I would prefer it if you were the only one to know.” 

The Blue Pajamas was made when Gonçalves was still a student in film school (she attended the Lisbon Theater and Film School and Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastián). Yet, at this early stage, she established an enduring interest in the uncanny textures of childhood, demonstrating a rare aptitude for working with child actors that leverages their fundamental unknowability to create elegantly elusive narratives. After all, how can we make sense of our youngsters—how could we dare define them—if they themselves are still discovering who they want to become? In The Blue Pajamas, the entry of their babysitter, a pleasantly placid teenage boy named Vicente, prompts this exploration—or, rather, separation, as each girl grows increasingly unique before our eyes. This process is demarcated by an amusingly simple gesture. Vicente has difficulty telling them apart, so the more adventurous girl switches into blue pajamas instead of matching with her sister’s purple ones. 

Gonçalves’s following film, the experimental short The Bath (2022), explores the childhood ritual of bathtime through a fluid chain of associations that collapse space and time. The camera plunges the viewer into an infant’s bathwaters and resurfaces with images of older children running through sprinklers. White sheets hanging out to dry across the lawn transform into the massive sails of a ship cruising across remote lake waters; and later, this vessel appears once more in the form of a toy sailboat. These ingenious transitions, complemented by the vivid sounds of swishing water and a mischievous, minimalistic score, instill mundane practices with an almost eerie sense of wonder. Recall the ouija board sequence in The Blue Pajamas, which further demonstrates Gonçalves’s mystic predilections. In The Bath, water is an enchanted force; its ripples and reflections of light accentuated to create arcane visual abstractions that heighten the film’s fantastic dimension. Stuffed animals are suspended underwater, drifting like lost treasures from another realm. 

If The Bath dignifies childhood by manifesting its imaginative possibilities, Gonçalvez’s most recent work, La Durmiente (2025), enacts a reverse form of magic by bringing the story of the Portuguese infanta, Beatriz, down to earth. The film, which was one of the winners of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam’s shorts competition, chronicles the 10-year-old Beatriz’s disputed claim to the Portuguese throne after the death of her father King Ferdinand I. Gonçalves stages this fierce political debacle using a cast composed almost entirely of child actors dressed in medieval garb and delivering their lines with a guileless simplicity. This playful, deliberately stilted period drama resembles a school play, an artifice embraced when one of the characters breaks the fourth wall. Yet Gonçalvez unearths the divine from the amateur by interspersing the children’s tender interactions with wandering shots of decadent cathedral murals and marble effigies, shadowy caves and elephantine tree trunks. Here, the director’s fusion of the monumental and the miniature; the majestic and the makeshift; the epic and the naive, carries across Portuguese history, embalming the memory of Beatriz—whose legacy has been largely forgotten—with the timeless touch of myth. “I have to stop,” she says in voiceover when ruminating over the schemes and battles waged over her denied inheritance, “otherwise my head will explode.” This sleeping beauty doesn’t wake up to a prince’s kiss; instead, she’s a child dozing through years of tumult she cannot comprehend.