Seleção Nacional — Telúricas

The last chapter of Seleção Nacional, programmed by Batalha and the Cineteca de Madrid, focuses on ‘telluric’ stories and experiences in Portuguese and Spanish cinema: films that are connected to the land and the landscape, breaking down cultural and temporal boundaries, and expressing modes of production and thought within cinema that seek to intersect with dynamics inextricably linked to the rhythms of nature. Spanning from the film-making movements of the post-dictatorship periods to contemporary cinema following the economic crisis of 2008, the screenings directly or indirectly bring into dialogue works from both countries that engage head-on with modes of film production and ways of life that develop in connection with the natural elements: at times observing, at times participating in their agency. Between the pulsating force of volcanoes, human immersion in harvest rituals, the sacred-profane festivities that mark the seasons, and the ‘returns’ to notions of home, of vital matter and of time that shed light on a dark socio-economic future, perhaps hopeless and compromised, we present — between Porto and Madrid — a selection of films that illustrate a peninsular cross-section of this ‘telluric’ cinema.

Curated by Guilherme Blanc and Luís Parés (Director of Cineteca de Madrid and Documenta Madrid)