Salomé Lamas

Started in 2018, the project – comprised of 11 segments by filmmakers from all around the world – reflects on the intertwined relationship between human society and nature that is aggravated by climate change on multiple scales, hinting at possible solutions.

The end of the Cold War did not bring about a definitive thaw in the former republics of the Soviet Union, so that today there are several frozen conflicts, unresolved for decades, in that vast territory. As in Transnistria, an unrecognized state, seceded from Moldova since 1990. Kolja is a silent witness of how borders and bureaucracy shape the lives of citizens, finally forced to lose their identity.

Us to the fascinating, disturbing, ghostly figure of Paulo de Figueiredo, professional mercenary soldier, from the sixties, played the hired liquidator task in diverse corners of the world.

The panoramic shots are breathtaking: a majestic mountain landscape in winter, flat-roofed tin shacks cowering next to one other, women perched on steep slopes using primitive tools to break through pieces of rock. La Rinconada is situated over 5,000 meters high in the Peruvian Andes, on the edge of a gold mine. This 21st century El Dorado is an inhospitable place, where untold numbers of people live and work in the most precarious of conditions, hoping both for gold and a better life. Salomé Lamas has constructed a cinematic diptych to convey the extremity of this situation and the dimensions of its misery without having to resort to graphic images.

Ubi Sunt. Porto. Cartography of an imaginary place attracted by the margins (social and geographical) Hybrid and eclectic project, it is the outcome of a audiovisual research residency of humam and urban exploration of an expanding city. Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?, meaning "Where are those who were before us?". Reflective essay on mortality and life's transience, it emerges from that dialectic, of a and episodic and fragmented structure with a choreographed cinematography; where the memory intersects the contemporary.

A woman finds herself, not sure how, in Beirut’s Hall of Fame after closing hours. Like Molly Bloom, and the more virtuous Penelope, this woman waits for her husband. She appears to have set a date with him. But he has not arrived. While she waits for her husband she interacts with the figures/statues in the Hall of Fame. She cleans the dust from their eyes, straightens out the baseball cap of another, she smooths out the cape of a third figure. She works so that they appear cleaner and better arranged. However, while she waits Hanan only makes an effort to improve the appearances of the figures that represent regional and world political leaders who are responsible for the chaos that ravages the Middle East. Despite Hanan’s effort, it will difficult for them to appear ‘clean.’

'In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the belongings of each guest of the hotel and observed through the details, lives that will remain unknown', says the temporary Chambermaid in a large seaside hotel, which, unable to communicate, lives through a rigid methodology of analysis of the exterior and a ritualised quotidian. Until the uncontrollable comes to disrupts this dynamic. Hotel Royal is fragmented and incomplete mosaic of contemporary societies. It could be dubbed a film about the horrors of the soul, about voyeurs or simply about misfits.

Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa portrays a brief moment of euphoria as the occupants on the raft spot a glimpsic illusion for their drift, hoping and praying to be rescued. We can almost hear the hoarse cries in an attempt to draw attention to their desperate plight, mustering their last ounce of strength to the void. This is their last chance of survival.

In the sixteenth century the Padrão Real hung from the ceiling of the Map Room in the Casa da Índia. It was a secret map, guarded from the eyes of foreign spies, which was changed and reworked with the comings and goings of each expedition. Aided by scientific equipment to measure distance, the navigators dreamed up the representation of the expanses that they had covered. When at sea, they looked up to the heavens and gauged their path by the stars, hands drawing in space fictional lines that carved territories. Upon returning to shore, they took the map that had previously belonged to others as their own, erasing divisive lines and constructing new borders. The map that they followed has been lost over time, and what remains of it is a stolen copy, made from memory by one of the cartographers in order to outwit enemies.

A man, Francisco, works in an open-pit mine. He goes to see his boss about taking the following day off. At first the boss doesn’t want to allow it as there is so much to do, but he finally concedes. The next day his daughter calls on him, a visit he no longer counted on. They spend the day with one another. The longer they are together, and the later the night gets, the more absurd the situations and moments they experience become.

Searching for redemption, a mother and a daughter go beyond their limits to break free from their comfortable but suffocating lives. A narrative of hallucinogenic qualities, pierced by moments of clarity.

How to represent an artistic intention without reducing it to a description? How to do it preserving the intentionality of the gestus in an ambiguous andsubjective space where the individualism of the artistic perspective is set. “my maladresse…” proposes a viewpoint over Ana Jotta’s universe. An analogous portrait of her relations as an artist is created, setting parallel questions, as hermeneutics possibility and art as a value system. The link relating the trio (artist and director’s deuce) balances between familiarity, master and apprentice, subject and object; the distance and authority of the one behind the camera spreading light around artisticurgencies concerning how Work and Life overlay in this unquiet chase of the greater purpose: a search for consolation in the holy_burlesque of existential functionalism. A documental laboratory of reflexive limits.

A Comunidade is a short documentary focused on CCL, the oldest camping park in Portugal.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

‘None of the people who were asked about me had seen me.’ Le Boudin documents the encounter of the young Elias Geißler with the testimony of Nuno Fialho who at the age of 16 was forced to enlist in the French Foreign Legion. ‘I didn’t enlist. They enlisted me.’

Three unusual paintings played by the director that literally tests her limits in this encounters with the landscape of São Miguel, in Azores. The power that emanates from the filmed landscape is as seductive as the risky shape of the encounter between image and sound. A limit-film for an inventive Portuguese artist.

How can I lie that I’m asleep and be faster than my body? - “But it wasn’t so violent, was it?” She stayed in bed repeating that she was sleepy for 40 minutes.“I’ve wanted it to be almost like a mantra and to generate tension.” The embroidery draw maps the relation between a mother and a daughter. Time past and time present if all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable. “It was a school exercise, I would use what was close to me, what was domestic and you were part of it” Fourteen years have past. I take her images; I compel her to answer me. She is the mother. She is the daughter. She is my mother.

Capitalocene. From above, the abstract monumentality of the Niger Delta (Nigeria), redefined by human ambition into environmental catastrophe. Existential fable. Another no-man’s-land, where the blackness or the psychopathology of (Frantz) Fanon’s colonization (and other African philosophers) seems now like an empty sound, and scholar debates, that understand neocolonialism, echo distant and misfit. In the war for oil, we find the resentment of a region forgotten and cursed by its resources.

Kolja’s experiment of merging his human body with nature in the form of a tree while venturing into a border zone between the earth and the sky may be due to his purity of spirit, the grandeur of fools or the madness of mystics. Is this enlightenment or simply an elaborate suicide?

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