TGLife
Camões-Centro de Lingua Portuguesa is marking the 45th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution with the screening of the 105 minute Portuguese film ‘Cartas da Guerra’ (2016) directed by Ivo M Ferreira with English subtitles on April 25 at 6 pm, followed by a discussion at Camões-CLP, Casa BasÃlio Dias, Opp Panaji Ferry Wharf, rua de Ormuz Road in Panaji.
The film Cartas da Guerra (meaning ‘Letters from War’) is a 2016 Portuguese drama film directed by Ivo and based on the epistolary novel D’este viver aqui neste papel descripto by António Lobo Antunes. The film was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival, where it had its world premiere. It was selected as the Portuguese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards.
This is Ivo’s third feature that stars Miguel Nunes as the young Antonio Lobo Antunes is about a Portuguese combat medic stationed in 1971 Angola (then Portuguese East Africa, still four years away from the independence) and who wrote the titular correspondence before becoming a celebrated novelist. Young Antonio suffers a severe case of saudade in ‘Letters From War’ (Cartas da Guerra), the third and by far most ambitious film from writer-director Ivo The twist here is that the titular correspondence refers to the actual wartime letters of Antonio Lobo Antunes. In the film, however, he’s simply a young soldier struggling with the absence of his pregnant (first) wife, who’s back in Portugal, and, to a lesser extent, his political ideas, which keep inclining to the left the more the Portuguese Colonial War drags on.
Shot in crisp black-and-white on location in Angola, this is a traditional art house film that combines Antunes’s letters, heard in a voice-over, with images that recreate the life of a Portuguese army doctor in Africa. Though festivals will be ready takers, this will be a tougher proposition commercially, especially in territories where Antunes isn’t a name author.
Antonio (Miguel Nunes) is first spied being shipped over to Angola. It takes a while for the film to establish which one of the soldiers’ faces is his, suggesting he’s one man among many, all with similar stories. Except in the opening and closing scenes, all of Antonio’s letters are read by a female voice, presumably that of his spouse, Maria Jose (actress Margarida Vila-Nova), who is glimpsed in what feels more like the feverish imagination of Antonio than scenes from her actual life.
The writing, credited to the director and Edgar Medina, seems to have been more of an editing job, deciding on which (parts of which) letters to include and then how to illustrate them. In general, the screenwriters seem more interested in the protagonist’s personal struggles ” which concentrate mainly on the fact he’s far away from home for months on end and misses his wife and their first child that she’s carrying ” than with his evolving ideas on politics.
Quite early on, Antonio explains in one of his letters that he’s beginning to realize he ‘can’t live without a political conscience’ and that he’s gradually turning more and more into a leftie. He plays chess with a captain (Joao Pedro Vaz) who’s been part of the opposition and who might have influenced his thinking, though unfortunately the film doesn’t tackle politics head-on very often or meaningfully enough to really get a sense of Antonio’s political transformation.
That said, the relationship between the aspiring writer and the absent mother of his (future) firstborn comes across as an intense affair even when only seen and heard from one side. It is practically a feature-length illustration of the (untranslatable) concept of saudade ” a type of longing for something or someone that isn’t there and can’t be there. More impressive is the scale of the production, which feels rather large for an art house project and which is captured by cinematographer Joao Ribeiro in sinuously choreographed shots.
The production companies O som e a furia and Shortcuts International has produced the film with producers Luis Urbano, Sandro Aguilar and co-producers Georges Schoucair and Michel Merkt. The film castes Miguel Nunes, Margarida Vila-Nova, Ricardo Pereira, Joao Pedro Vaz, Simao Cayatte, Isac Graca and Francisco Hestnes Ferreira. The screenplay is by Ivo and Edgar Medina and the director of photography is by Joao Ribeiro. The production designer is Nuno G Mello, costume designer, Lucha d’Orey and editor Sandro Aguilar.
(For registration and further information one can contact on 7030655664 or email to [email protected] )
