Our Land Our Altar / A nossa Terra, o nosso Altar
Gothenburg
Sat 19 Nov
18:45 — Hagabion
Malmö
Sat 26 Nov
16:45 — Panora
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PRODUCTION YEAR: 2020
GENRE: Documentary
DIRECTOR: André Guiomar
COUNTRY: Portugal
FILM DURATION: 77 min
AGE LIMIT: 12
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Documentary on the Aleixo neighborhood of Porto, Portugal: a low-income working class community plagued by drug sales and slated for demolition. Will its dispersed residents, ripped from their homes, have the force to carry on?
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LANGUAGE: Portuguese
SUBTITLES: English
Review
A Nossa Terra, O Nosso Altar (Our Land, Our Altar, 2020) is André Guiomar's first feature film, and a documentary shot over several years with the residents of the Aleixo neighbourhood in Porto, as the towers they inhabit were slowly emptying once the deadline for their demolition was set. It is a film similar to others shot in recent years on the same theme, such as the short films Bicicleta (2014) by Luís Vieira Campos, in which Guiomar participated as a camera assistant, and Russa (2018) by João Salaviza and Ricardo Alves Jr., which above all portray the desolate conditions to which these residents have been condemned in recent years, and especially since the 2011 demolition of the neighbourhood was announced; and is a film close to Tarrafal (2016) by Pedro Neves, about another neighbourhood in Porto (S. João de Deus) abandoned to its own sadness, who shares with Guiomar’s film the way it portrays, with empathy and without flourishes, the spirit of the inhabitants who, in the face of adversity and helplessness from the authorities, try to make the best of a difficult situation.
The film is divided into two distinct moments. The first one was filmed in 2013, when two of the five towers in the neighbourhood had already been demolished, at a time when the degradation of the living conditions was already evident and, worse than that, the almost void halls seemed increasingly inhabited by ghosts and memories of other times, in the presence of harbingers of an irreversible but drawn-out end, haunted by symbols such as apartment doors that are boarded up, like forbidden signs about an era, about a community that saw entire families born and disappear there. If this first part is not very different in relation to what other films on the same theme had already revealed, it is in the second part of Our Land, Our Altar, filmed in 2019 and closer in time to the end of the neighbourhood, that the film takes on a new dimension. The death of one of the youngest members of one of the families portrayed in the film at the beginning, and the family's mourning that is also the mourning of an entire community, shakes the film and it is as if the ghosts suddenly had a face. In that process, the emptiness one feels in the buildings, haunted by a silence that grows and becomes oppressive and deafening, where once noise was a sign of life, is striking. So, it is when the film shows a kind of communal celebration in honour of the lost son-brother-friend, which is also about lost memories, and about what was and will not be again, that the film strikes a remarkable emotional note, a redemption against the erasure of history, which leaves us looking forward to the next work of this young director.
João Araújo
À pala de Walsh