Montemor

"The film starts at dusk. A low angle shot of a landscape shows a figure slowly pushing its way towards us through a clump of brushwood and thickets. We are in Montemor, a small place in the portuguese countryside, right in the heart of the country – a place Ignasi Duarte picked up as the set of his first movie. We won’t learn anything about this village and its striking sites of interest though. Ignasi Duarty chose to use different ways or channels. Are we witnessing somebody’s arrival? No, even better, we are faced with somebody’s descent, somehow reminiscent of Alice’s descent into her hole.
This is a peculiar place full of ghost-like characters arising from nowhere, such as this sculptor infatuated with frogs or this man coming from Africa, as he points out in a compulsive monologue summoning God. They are followed by musicians, a procession we can hardly glimpse through the depths of the forest. Are these people living in the village? The main question asked by the film goes beyond that. At this point, we realise we are in a comedy as we find ourselves escorting the main character, a mute, almost crazed looking figure, whose wanderings provide many occasions for enigmatic encounters, full of movements with unfathomable purposes: picking up, humming, sculpting… and waiting. The film doesn’t mean to offer any explanation, its purpose is to show a whimsical and somehow fantastic distortion of reality through this piece of land and the few figures passing through, with History looming between the lines." (Nicolas Féodoroff, FIDMarseille 2012)