Festival Films A-Z

Kintop
Campo Pequeno, 50-2.° Esq. 1000-082
Lissabon
Portugal
Tel.: +35 1 213 541 958
E-Mail: info@kintop.net

Vasco Riobom

Susana de Sousa Dias, Helena Alves, Val?rie Br?gaint

Musik: António de Sousa Dias

Doc&Co
Marie-Pierre Mourne
13, rue Portefoin
75003 Paris
Frankreich
Tel.: +33 1 42 77 56 87
Fax: +33 1 42 77 36 56
E-Mail: mpmourne@doc-co.com
Internet:
www.docco.nexenservices.com

Synopsis

Still Life is an aesthetically exceptional film about the darkest chapter in the history of Portugal. It is a film about the Portuguese dictatorship, which began in the early 1930s and ended in 1974 with the 'Carnation Revolution'. In her fascinating experimental film, the director Susana de Sousa Dias combines archive footage from the Salazar era with police photographs and a specially composed score. She slows down the archive footage (which in its pristine form is only twelve minutes long) and gets immersed in the images, thus creating meaning from seemingly banal material. She thoroughly explores places and faces, which - taken out of their original propagandistic context - assume new meaning and, in combination with the musical score, reveal the story behind the history.
"In the course of the last years, my work has focused on the Portuguese dictatorship, the 'Estado Novo', the 'New State', which was founded in 1933 and was suddenly abolished by the "Carnation Revolution" in 1974. For my research, I visited many archives and saw thousands of photographs. Without a doubt, the most impressive visit was to the archives of the former secret police, the 'Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado' ? PIDE.
I went through the records and documents, looked at photographs, and read through PIDE's instructions and methods. The decisive moment came when I opened the folders that contained countless photographs of political prisoners. The longer I studied them, the more I wanted to find out about them. I realized that these photographs were hiding something ineffable, something that could not be explained.
Still Life evolved out of the desire to reflect on these photographs, which obviously stand for the photographs of hundreds of thousands of political prisoners held all over the world. They led me to other pictures from the period: they were all the results of a kind of assertion of power: news reels, war reports, documentaries, shot on the orders of the Ministry of Propaganda. And archive footage, predominantly black-and-white, which had never been edited. All of them contribute to the de-masking of an era. Using them, Still Life attempts to depict an authoritarian regime - and, to some, extent, its flipside. I never intended to explain history, or to give a lecture on it. I wanted to make a film that deals with historic material. I did not want to use language, only images. Still Life shows images without comment, without the coercive power of words that tell us how to interpret what we see (...)." Susana de Sousa Dias

Biography

Uma Época de Ouro-Cinema Português 1930?45 (1998),
Processo-Crime 141/53-Enfermeiras no Estado Novo (2000), Stilleben (2005)

Filmography

Uma Época de Ouro-Cinema Português 1930?45 (1998),
Processo-Crime 141/53-Enfermeiras no Estado Novo (2000), Stilleben (2005)

Dates

31	04.10.2007	19:00	Filmhaus
74	07.10.2007	17:30	Kommkino