ANA

At the center of Ana - the second feature by Antonio Reis and Margarida Cordeiro - is Ana, an elderly matriarch portrayed by Cordeiro's own mother (Ana Maria Martins Guerra). She cares for her children and grandchildren in the far-off mountains of Tres-os-Montes in Portugal's Northeast. As the children grow, we see the evolution of their inner life; meanwhile, Ana becomes sick and her imminent death looms. Through a series of non-linear scenes resembling reminiscences and rituals, with voiceovers adapted from poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Reis and Cordeiro link individual experience to the collective toils of people throughout the ages, and the collective to the earth and its history, all wrapped up in the cycles of life and death and renewal. Keyed to the resonances of small gestures, footsteps, and whispers, Ana sustains the hushed atmosphere of a chamber piece, even as it opens out to vast landscapes and to eternity.

Subjects & Collections

Related Films

TRAS-OS-MONTES A film of long shadows and smoke in twilight, Tras-os-Montes is an intensive labor of recollection, an epic of a land and a way of life on the edge of oblivion, and a major turning point in the history of Portuguese cinema.

ROSA DE AREIA Reis and Cordeiro's final film, is their most unclassifiable endeavor. The film is a work of abstraction drawing on a diverse range of texts ranging from Michel de Montaigne to Carl Sagan. In Cordeiro's words, "Rosa de Areia is a film for those who can see and listen as if for the first time; as if it was the first film that came from the earth and spoke about it."