New Moons: Mário Macedo

This screening is a clear reflection of the work of Mário Macedo who, through different modes of filmmaking, has remained faithful to the themes he continues to pursue in various ways: the idea of community and family, of complicity in the sharing of time as a form of resistance against isolation. The first film, Maria Sem Pecado (Maria Without Sin), from 2016, is above all a work against forgetting—a response to the erosion of time, and, for that reason, an admirable gesture. First and foremost, because it centers on the relationship between Maria, aged 88 and with a fading memory, and one of her sons, Rui, who takes care of her—now mostly confined to a bed in the fragility of these final years of life. It's a raw, unadorned documentary, composed of long, strategically framed static shots that gradually reveal life in this small corner of the world, seemingly forgotten by the rest. Besides caring for his mother, Rui spends his days tending the house and garden, enjoying the sunlight; later, we come to understand that he has recently been released from prison, and these moments take on a different weight. Maria’s memory loss is painful, but it also becomes a means for her to reconcile her story with Rui’s—a kind of prolonged pre-farewell. Beyond the theme of memory, this is also a film concerned with showing how its characters fill their time and push back against the dullness of the everyday, in search of some sense of meaning, a small joy. The complicity between mother and son, both hostages of time’s passing, ultimately reveals itself as a form of personal salvation.

The themes of complicity, a certain farewell in the face of time that moves forward without return and without leaving the same place, and the occupation of moments that, through their repetition and prostration, seem to lose all meaning, also occupy a large part of the second film in this screening, Third Shift, from 2021. Set in a small town in northern Portugal, the film follows Agostinho, who suffers a seizure after leaving the factory where he works. What follows are small moments of a sleepy, anesthetized existence, filled with anxieties about the fragility of a life that seems to fade away with each shift. For example, when his girlfriend announces that, having received good exam results, she will be able to go study in Lisbon, their embrace signals an inevitable farewell. The moments with Agostinho’s friends hide, beneath a veil of apathy and fatigue, an internal revolt, an unexpressed inner unrest, except in the sequences where Agostinho drives his red Peugeot at high speed, his ultimate form of escape. The sharing of these moments of inertia, these dead times among friends, in contrast to solitude—and in particular, the solitude of work—still allows for some comfort within this cycle of repetition.

If Third Shift is a visually stripped-down film, bordering on a certain minimalism dominated by the slow passage of time, with his most recent film, That’s How I Love You (2024), Mário Macedo takes the refinement of a naturalistic style even further, reducing the action to a country house and the story to what happens over just a few hours. Filmed in Croatia, the short follows a child, Ivan, who spends a holiday with his grandparents. Here, away from the city, time has its own rhythm, and for a child, it is necessary to find a distraction from monotony—even if it is a scary story told by the grandmother. The complicity shared with the grandfather, who finds in his grandson’s curiosity his own distraction, leads to a series of small transgressions—a cigarette shared with the grandfather, learning to shoot a shotgun—that take Ivan on an unexpected journey of discovering the consequences of his actions. In this small fable about the premature loss of innocence, we also find cinema as a form of communion, and, as in the other films, a closeness between those seeking refuge in the small gestures of everyday life and perhaps, through them, escaping the ephemerality of existence.