A glazed ochre goat by António Ramalho, generously given to me in an act of friendship and now a permanent occupant of these shelves, faces me as I detain myself over the films of Ana Isabel Mariz, and this text. Let’s begin, then, in the future, with that hint of a film, that like a promised flower, only fragments of which are revealed to us: Todas As Rosas (2023), a journey to the bestiary (and to life itself, where the two are inseparable) imagined by Rosa Ramalho (1888–1977), in the company of her descendants and disciples — the Ramalhos — evoking in part the fiery meeting between the folk artist and a certain intellectual and artistic elite, specifically with António Quadros: “– What’s your name? – Rosa; – Where are you from? – Galegos; – Where? – Barcelos. 60km and clay in my head.” Also in her head, that imagery, where men and beasts merge, the sacred and profound, legends, dreams and traditions, in which the understanding of the world was built from those earthy hands that first carry the mattock, and then mould the clay. Goats, roosters, donkeys, snakes, lizards, hedgehogs, geckos, Christs, devils, all with anthropomorphic features, which reveal the tragicomedy of life, those Nietzschean satyrs exploding with laughter in a never-ending guffaw. Humour is good for something, at last. Close up, oversizing these pieces for the screen, Mariz’s lens helps to reveal their coarse subtleties, like this female body whose breasts stick out comically and from whose stomach, in a grotesque image, an open-mouthed child bursts, or even those haunting giant-headed devils who disappear into smoke before our very eyes.

While it is correct that one can only film truthfully — that is, appropriately — what one knows intimately, in Matilde Olha Para Trás (2021), Mariz takes a chance on a fiction shot in a familiar context. Abstaining entirely from the biographical and aesthetic gestures of home movies, the interstices of this fiction nevertheless reveal the rural world of the Minho region: the gold earrings Matilde adorns herself with, the night-time dashes through the cornfields, the plucking of the chickens, the matriarchal domestic space, the biblical staging of the religious processions. Here is a psycho-geographical portrait of a region, whose religiousness, in fact, dates back to the director’s first film, Vigília (2016). “I learnt to see in my childhood,” wrote the poet Ruy Belo, in a verse that could serve as an epigraph for this film. More than representing childhood solitude through Matilde, who escapes from the apparent seriousness of adults into her own fictions, Mariz places herself literally at the level of a child, of that child. Like a child who peeks over the shoulder of another, like in that scene where we overhear the conversation between two teenagers through a door that is slightly ajar, only to later realise that we occupy the body of While it is correct that one can only film truthfully — that is, appropriately — what one knows intimately, in Matilde Olha Para Trás (2021), Mariz takes a chance on a fiction shot in a familiar context. Abstaining entirely from the biographical and aesthetic gestures of home movies, the interstices of this fiction nevertheless reveal the rural world of the Minho region: the gold earrings Matilde adorns herself with, the night-time dashes through the cornfields, the plucking of the chickens, the matriarchal domestic space, the biblical staging of the religious processions. Here is a psycho-geographical portrait of a region, whose religiousness, in fact, dates back to the director’s first film, Vigília (2016). “I learnt to see in my childhood,” wrote the poet Ruy Belo, in a verse that could serve as an epigraph for this film. More than representing childhood solitude through Matilde, who escapes from the apparent seriousness of adults into her own fictions, Mariz places herself literally at the level of a child, of that child. Like a child who peeks over the shoulder of another, like in that scene where we overhear the conversation between two teenagers through a door that is slightly ajar, only to later realise that we occupy the body of Matilde, who then emerges to take her own place. Or when adult voices invade the out-of-shot space, reiterating the alienation on the face of the child and provoking a latent, permanent tension that brings back a memory of La Ciénaga (2001), by Lucrecia Martel. With this matryoshka of performances — family life, dolls, religion — the director holds on to the experience of play as an aesthetic experience, reminding us that “playing is the most serious thing in the world” and that, as Walter Benjamin noted, it is not “making-believe” but a “making always-new”, an infinite field of possibilities and reconfigurations.

Doors, bodies, passages make up the cinematic matrix of Ana Isabel Mariz, who has also worked as director of photography and assistant director on a range of film productions, including Nobody (2023), by Marcela Jacobina, and Silvestre (2021), by Rúben Gonçalves. Two stricken lives in a society in crisis: economic crisis, social crisis, existential crisis, another way of saying symbolic misery. In Nobody, Marcela Jacobina explores the ambiguities in the emotional life of a camgirl who calls herself nobody, revealing from the start not only the identity crisis she is going through — between herself and the persona she embodies — but also the ambition of anonymity so characteristic of today’s cybernetic networks. Networks that are precarious, since the supposed hypersexualisation of the image of the body corresponds, necessarily, to an absence of desire in its broadest sense, a desire for life; this because the device adopted — camera vs camera, to which is added the third absent camera of the stranger, a network of surveillance — reveals the generalised flux of information that is no longer able to keep our attention. In Silvestre, by Rúben Gonçalves, it is the body-to-body that appears throughout in an inhospitable realism. The body that delivers itself to pleasure, to struggles, to work. “Tired are the bodies that go back home,” sings Sérgio Godinho on “Lisbon At Dawn”. And there goes Silvestre, not knowing to which house he is going, now that his housemates have decided to live alone. What now? Now it’s Alvalade. Maybe Glasgow. And so Silvestre joins António, by Silva Melo, who joins Xavier, by Manuel Mozos, “boys of Lisbon”, fated to the indifference of this city that has little or nothing to offer them.