We can’t go home again — notes on love and delirium in Portuguese films

“Silvestre, a film, a heart of fire; it burns passionately - in essence and form - in its very energy; defenseless, frantic, it regains itself, it is reborn aware of its relativity. In the end it humanizes itself like the materials - theatre and life - from which it is created.
From the deserts of love to the solitude of the stars, the journey is hard, painful, and chaotic through all rebellious dreams: because it is through the cold that we ascend, or simply stated: we can’t go home again, as our friends who now rest have said.
Through fascism, we were cut of from the lifeline of our own history, pulverized: what future will be ours? Broken into a thousand pieces, we make films, vainly invoking the “bright knowledge of the elves”, trying to gather ourselves.
The wound opened by this exploration is terrible - it maps out a fragile, almost imaginary land shaped by chance. Will we ever be able to read the fragments of our scattered body and connect them to a shared sense of purpose? Our destiny is a mysterious manuscript, written over time and never fully revealed.Who are we, so identical to ourselves and yet nothing at all? What does our vague and so obscure strangeness look like?”

João César Monteiro

Looking for a possible Portuguese cinema of our time, I found myself going back to one of the most enigmatic films in our history: João César Monteiro’s Silvestre. After a revolutionary period that gave way to the mirage of the European Union and to the rise of a neoliberal project for Portugal, cinema still seemed to hold the key to people’s hearts. It held the secret of an imaginary that, reserved to itself, nourished a rebellious fantasy that may rise above reality and vindicate the possibility of an identity defined by a desire for connection, a tendency to be in movement with all things, an innocence. The poet Mário Cesariny gave the sharpest image to such a disparagement as between imagination and lack of practical ambition: Portugal is a child-country.  In the aftermath of a revolution that ended 48 years of fascist dictatorship and, in the face of new collective narratives - of a future to be built upon a capitalistic institutional order - the popular imaginary and its tales offered the possibility of envisaging a horizon linked to an inscrutable common destiny. If we can’t go home again, our destiny seems to be one of looking into the multiplicity, in and out of ourselves, and learning the generosity of being a stranger.

It is true that the sociopolitical conditions of Portugal in 2025 are different from those in 1980. 50 years of democracy have introduced radical changes in society and have deepened even more the consensus that the country belongs within the European project. The changes run so deep that, today, the country takes the time to question liberties and rights that have been conquered after the revolution and inscribed in the constitution: memory can be treacherous. However, Monteiro elucidated a seed; this principle of an innocence that desires all things, that seeks the “bright knowledge of the elves”, that remains active and vital. After Monteiro, this seed generated some of the richest and most inspiring filmic practices, and that is what this programme tries to point to. Possibly, such a filmography is one of the most fruitful sources for a very much needed new political imaginary; one that responds with openness, and a sense of possibility to the contemporary political ambitions that seem to have narrowed our collective lives.

By assembling these four screenings, with seven films in total, there was no intention of delivering a theory of any kind. Neither about the films themselves nor the cinema that they could be intended to represent. On the one hand, these films do not represent anything other than themselves, as they deserve the respect of being considered only for what they are. On the other hand, such an endeavor would flatten and dissolve the potential that each film has to explode the category it is asked to illustrate. This is not a programme about Portuguese cinema, and it is not a programme that follows any thematic agenda. Instead, it follows one very personal, and hopefully shared, wish: to find a thread of films that liberate us from the growingly narrow conversations about the way cinema and world can speak to each other. Away from the morality of cinema as representation stands a cinema that refuses to let go of its desire of the world and all things in it.

Sovereign, it will not submit.

Silvestre speaks precisely of this sovereignty of desire and love for all things. As Monteiro defined it, it is a film about learning — possibly, learning the scale of things — as Sílvia declares herself “alone in front of the stars” and acquiesces to a pure love. In Silvestre’s stylistic form; its dialogues co-written with Maria Velho da Costa (one of the authors of a quintessential book on female love and desire, New Portuguese Letters); in the encounter between the folk life and tales and an almost abstract artificiality culminating in the final encounter with the cosmos. Silvestre is the affirmation of a choice for beauty, for a cinema where everyone may find their own path to freedom. The scene with the war prisoner offers a view of such a choice and of a possible moral that breathes throughout the film. Sílvia, disguised as Silvestre, engaged in the hunting of the man that tormented her and her sister, criticizes her comrades when they abuse a war prisoner tied to a tree. She asks, “is it wasting time to show mercy to our enemies?”, and tries to interrogate the man, to which he responds with violence and insult. Love and desire are not voluntarist mechanisms at the service of any project of world changing. Rather, in combination, they constitute an interior movement that offers a lucid gaze over the world’s contradictions and its negativity.

Gomes’ Canticle of All Creatures speaks directly to Monteiro’s Silvestre. Not only by way of its formal choices, but also through its engagement with popular culture and the progressive expansion of the film’s object from a singular situated tale into an all-encompassing openness. Within this programme, the link between Monteiro’s and Gomes’ films brings a dimension that haunts the other films. Curiosity is the hand of the innocent, one that longs to touch and connect with all things as they are. Curiosity as a moral movement, that opens life into its dangers and beauties. Francisco, guided by the kind patience of Clara, reencounters his own capacity to contemplate the offers of nature, free from man’s lack of imagination and rush into judgement. Interestingly, in Canticle of All Creatures, Clara is played by Mariana Ricardo, a long-time collaborator of Gomes in both the co-writing of his films and the construction of a cinema that choses elevation over condemnation, openness instead of separation, joyful desire over a morally self-affirming subjectivity. Francisco is played by João Nicolau, a musician and filmmaker notoriously inspired by Monteiro (co-editor of his final film), whose filmography is marked by a deep trust in the innocence and sovereignty of imagination.

— Clara, será possível que me encontre num sonho?
 — Se assim for, será que sonho convosco?

— [Clara, is it possible that I find myself in a dream?]

— [If that is so, am I dreaming with you?]

Inês Lima’s The Moving Garden plays into this picture by taking curiosity not only as an intellectual or even spiritual movement, but also a haptic one, embodied and multi-sensorial, that overwhelms and opens new forms of being among other beings. Framed in a guided tour of the natural wonders of Serra da Arrábida, the film creates a sort of eco-chamber between camera and characters and between characters and the objects of nature. Within such an idiosyncratic community, the camera morphs not only into the curious hand that touches, but also into the desired flower ready to be touched. All things connecting, all things transformed in an endless movement. In this sense, there is a religious sense of being in connection, a link towards the world that is above all a source of mystical joy. How can we ever reconnect our fragmented bodies with a civic desire? asked Monteiro. The question is double: it regards both the possibilities of reconnection and the nature of desire as a community principle. Again, curiosity as a moral standpoint from which to be among others. To that, Patrick Mendes’ The Earth of No Return responds with a communal mythology, a community that gives back life and a sensorial world through transforming mud into organs. The sculpted eye becomes, in this sense, the link between interiority and exteriority, matter and life, the fallen being redeemed by the communal imagination.

We can’t go home again is very much the recognition of a memory that cannot be retraced but rather becomes the arena for an exploration of the world or, at least, an intuition of its cosmic magnitude. Silva in Rio Corgo is the archetype of an absolute stranger. First and foremost he is a stranger to himself, finding death as a point of confluence between his mysterious and multiple pasts and his presence unfolding between ghosts and reality in rural Portugal. Renovating the deep influence of rurality in our cinema, Rio Corgo places an excentric seed in the heart of an often romanticized, even fetishized, sense of identity. Rural Portugal and its peoples have (too) often been the object of derives that tried to follow some of the most vital, even revolutionary, reflections of its lives (from Manoel de Oliveira to António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, Manuela Serra or Noémia Delgado). Sérgio da Costa and Maya Koza are, themselves, both strangers and intimate to a village where da Costa’s family had origin before migrating to Switzerland. The phantom of migration remains in this film as an undercurrent. It never finds resolution nor articulation. It is an experience that translates, first and foremost, by a hybridity that opens up reality to its breaches and allows meanings to become enigmas.

Such hybridity, far from being any formula, is one that speaks to the very ontology of images. In that sense, Tiago Siopa’s Ghosts, Long Way Home offers a rich experiment into the ways in which the territory of a film is a complex, multi-layered, multi-temporal problem. Contrary to Rio Corgo, it is shot within the filmmaker’s most quotidian, intimate arena, his closest family. This time, strangeness is discovered through the patient, humble and sensitive observation of things and beings. The ghost of a grandmother is the trigger for an exploration of the invisible properties of images, of the ways in which reality unfolds as a territory for both spiritual adventures and liberating deliriums. The film operates as a series of expansions from the closest elements to the widest cosmic visions. Nothing is excluded from this fantasmagoria, as all things are to be celebrated.

Motu Maeva is, when it comes to fantasmagoria, the strangest and yet most crystalline film in this programme. A constant fluidity of tentative images, both filmed and spoken, never worried about beginnings nor endings, but instead with the energy of each image as a capsule of the multiplicities that vibrate in the lifetime of a woman. One small, distinct and yet untraceable place, a refuge that becomes an all-encompassing, incessant movement that brings along memories, pains and desires. Here, we go back to Sílvia/Silvestre, the young lady who dares to learn how to desire all things. In Motu Maeva, such desire has no defined form or place: it is not an attribution nor a theme; far from that, it is the condition of the film, its way of being.

To programme cinema brings along a sense of impotency: films are not here to teach us how to live, nor to provide explanations about how the world is or should be. The Earth turns incessantly regardless of how we create images, and with such turns there is a growing sense of an ongoing fall. Today, humanity seems to be reencountering its own darkest hours of the past. The practice of sharing films with audiences becomes, in this context, an excess. Beyond what is reasonable, necessary or in measure with what happens to us. A purpose for such a practice, maybe, is to share visions of life and its possibilities that may liberate us from our insufficient categories and systems. From ourselves, even. Such is the impulse underlying We can’t go home again, to propose as a possibility the moral effort of standing “alone in front of the stars.”

Biography
Born in Portugal, Cíntia Gil was the director of Doclisboa, in Portugal, and Sheffield DocFest (UK). Gil created the cinema club Artistic Differences, with Jenny Miller and Christopher Allen, at UnionDocs (NY), and joined the programming team of Cannes Directors Fortnight. Cíntia has curated film series and exhibitions, and has taught seminars, lectures and workshop in different institutions, such as Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico, EICTV in Cuba, and HGK Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany, among others.

She is a member of the Board of Apordoc – Portuguese Documentary Association and has served on juries in festivals such as Berlinale, Cairo, Mar del Plata, Jerusalem, Taiwan, FidMarseille, DokuFest, and Ficunam, among others.