Seleção Nacional: The Stone Still Awaits to Bloom

Director Víctor Erice argues that “all cinephiles are orphans.” This search for one’s parents, whether symbolic or real, brings the cinema spectator closer to the condition of children, just as it brings them closer to the fact that both perceive the world on a grand scale, from below upwards. This “smallness” intensifies the obstacle of the world, which should not be underestimated, and initiates the process that makes the transition from screen to the viewer’s gaze so effective, with otherness projected as a means of growth for those observing this world.

Thus, alongside the multiple dimensions of cinema, we can add the particular strength it possesses in shaping the spectators’ gaze and imagination. Observation of reality and the power of fiction, through the lens of cinema, are specific ways of conceiving otherness, serving as a means for us to grow, learn about the world, and acquire the tools to face it. In other words, each film gradually reveals its own concerns, which are both universal and particular, as they reflect not only the experience of being alive, but also the characteristics of each territory and affective geography, as well as the result of the creative act of each filmmaker, with their own gaze and way of seeing the world.

What this programme proposes is a reflection on the question: how has the realm of Portuguese cinema depicted the various challenges of growing up? From this central question, others naturally emerge. What issues confront its protagonists, and how do they respond to them? What are their gestures, their aspirations, their difficulties? What changes, and what remains, in the act of growing up on film? How is childhood, adolescent, and early adulthood sensitivity captured on screen? Is it merely a matter of the camera’s placement and height, or does the entire universe shift, requiring different cinematic methods and languages?

In the programme The Stone Still Awaits to Bloom, whose title is taken from a book compiling texts by Raul Brandão, we suggest a trajectory that moves backwards, comparing the challenges of growing up as the world expands and becomes strange while we are still children. Thus, the programme begins with a protagonist in their thirties and concludes with a ten-year-old girl. In A Cara Que Mereces (The Face You Deserve), Miguel Gomes films the difficulty of passing through the threshold into the adult world, where maintaining a realm of fantasy remains a way to preserve a certain gift of youth and to keep at a distance the responsibility for one’s own life choices. Pedro Cabeleira’s debut feature, Verão Danado (Damned Summer), looking slightly further back, provides access to another “threshold”: the transition from the end of formal education to a set of expectations related to future dreams yet to be realised. Interestingly, while Gomes’ first feature, made when he was 32, is filmed with a melancholic desire to stay, Cabeleira’s initial work, premiered when the director was 25, is marked by urgency and a drive to leave and find a path.

In 1986, with Uma Rapariga no Verão (A Girl in Summer), Vítor Gonçalves already grasped, even in his first film, the urgency of the end of a time of summer, of warmth, as a metaphor for the transition of Isabel, the young protagonist, into a world of responsibility and independence. While the “approaches” of Gonçalves and Cabeleira naturally diverge across the more than three decades separating their films, the anxieties associated with this passage remain unchanged.

Os Mutantes (The Mutants), Teresa Villaverde’s most acclaimed work, reveals the resilience of youth when the traditional supports of family or social protection fail: the street becomes a space requiring adaptation, the planting of roots even where there is nothing but stone, as our title suggests. A few months after 25 April 1974, Eduardo Geada began his career as a director with Sofia e a Educação Sexual (Sofia and Sexual Education), confronting the “scandal” posed to unaccustomed minds by the sexual awakening of a young bourgeois girl. Using a different cinematic language that reflects on video and the tension between reality TV and the exploration of intimacy, Rosa Coutinho Cabral’s Lavado em Lágrimas (Washed in Tears ) is a work that also treats youth sexuality as a delicate issue, particularly in contexts of poverty and orphanhood.

One of the most striking works of Portuguese cinema is also marked by the theme of orphanhood. Pedro Costa’s cinematic debut, O Sangue (Blood, 1989), unfolds between the dreamlike realm of childhood and the sudden need for familial reorganisation faced by two siblings after their father’s departure. Finally, we will also present the first film by Lauro António, Manhã Submersa (Submersed Morning), executed with a rigorous and unflinching hand, which depicts the imposition on a twelve-year-old child of a future dictated by faith—a means of circumventing poverty. The programme concludes with the surprised and innocent gaze of Salomé, the ten-year-old protagonist of Alma Viva by Cristèle Alves Meira. The death of her grandmother and the family conflicts in a village in Trás-os-Montes are the first signs of a loss that, by the end of this programme, heralds the beginning of a long life.