E voltaram a dançar/ Et ils se remirent à danser
Director:
Apolline Weinstein
Producer:
Rita Sousa Rêgo
Production company:
Largo Filmes
Production country:
Portugal
Duration in minutes:
50
Contact:
Sinopsys:
In Coimbra, in the center of Portugal, República Baco is a self-managed student house and community that has existed since 1934. In summer of 2025, I move into the house to live as part of the community and film its daily life. Three weeks later, the house faces eviction.
Long Sinopsys
In the heart of Coimbra, Portugal, República Baco is a self-managed student house with a rich political, social, and cultural history dating back to 1934. During the summer of 2025, I join the house and live with its inhabitants, sharing their daily life: communal meals, late-night discussions, urgent assemblies, and the small gestures that keep the community alive.
Three weeks later, the announcement of eviction shakes our balance. Tensions rise, disagreements emerge, and we must decide how to resist while staying united. Through these intimate and collective moments, the film bears witness to what we experience: the struggle to preserve our space, the transmission of memory, and the ways we continue to invent what it means to live together.
Nothing stops a people who dance. To dance again even when they try to destroy us becomes a vital and political act, a symbol of resilience, solidarity, and life in the face of urgency.
Creative Process
How can we film the space and the community we inhabit? Not doing it at a distance is a deliberate choice. The film seeks to find voice, sound, and image to convey what we experience in a situation as fragile as preserving the memory of this place and the life of this community.
The film adopts a subjective point of view, based on my eye, my experience, and my relationship with the house and its inhabitants. My voice emerges intentionally throughout the narrative, punctuated by immersive shots and contributions from the inhabitants themselves. The goal is to show collective life through the collective, while capturing fragility, memory, and intimacy of the space.
Sequence 1: Model and Poetic Introduction
· Poetic description: The building’s façade is first presented as a closed entity. When it opens, each room appears inhabited. The scale model becomes a narrative and symbolic tool: it spatializes memory, makes a threatened place tangible, and provides access to the intimacy of lived spaces.
· Tone and intention: Contemplative, poetic, meditative. The voice-over introduces the place and its stories.
· Technical note: The model will be filmed in wide shots and close-ups to reveal objects and textures, with natural or directed light to highlight the fragility of the space.
Sequence 2: Onirique Discovery of Baco (Super 8)
· Poetic description: A sequence in the attic of another Républica. Light filters through the rafters, dust rests on old floorboards, and empty space awaits habitation. A poetic voice-over accompanies these images, evoking emotion, memories, and the history of the place. These images bring the rooms’ potential inhabitants to life.
· Tone and intention: Romantic, slow, contemplative. The fragile beauty of the space is emphasized.
· Narrative thread: This sequence introduces the discovery of Baco and the emotional connection to the place.
Sequence 3: Daily Life and Shared Meals (Super 8)
· Poetic description: Moments of preparing and sharing meals with the inhabitants. Intimate conversations, meetings, daily gestures, quiet moments in the house. These simple actions become acts of resistance, showing collective life as an extension of the place’s memory.
· Tone and intention: Realistic, immersive, warm, and grounded in everyday life.
· Technique and rhythm: Long takes for gestures, light tracking shots following inhabitants’ movements, alternation of close-ups and wide shots. Voice-over punctuates the images, highlighting subjectivity.
· Inhabitant contributions: Some film their daily life with small cameras; their footage is organically integrated into the narrative.
Sequence 4: Urgency and Housing Rights Struggle super 8
· Poetic description: A sequence combining footage of current housing rights protests, archival images from the Carnation Revolution, and the deconstruction of buildings in Coimbra. Violence and urgency are observed and heard, without voice-over.
· Tone and intention: Fast, intense, raw. The tension and impact of eviction on the community are palpable.
· Narrative thread: Urgency emphasizes the fragility of the place and the need to preserve its memory.
Sequence 5: Return to the Collective and Inhabitant Contributions
· Poetic description: Footage filmed by the inhabitants themselves is interwoven with my voice-over. We see house meetings, assemblies with former residents, meal preparations, quiet moments, and daily gestures.
· Tone and intention: A mix of contemplation and realism, punctuated by the subjectivity and poetry of the voice-over.
· Narrative thread: Highlights living memory, solidarity, and collective resistance.
Overall Dramatic Arc
1. Introduction / emergence of the place – contemplative, poetic, scale model
2. Discovery and romanticization – emotion, fragile memory (Super 8)
3. Daily life – intimacy, resistance, solidarity (meals, meetings)
4. Urgency and struggle – social tension, protests, archives, dramatic intensity
5. Return to the collective – inhabitants’ voices, memory, transmission
Aesthetic and Technical Intentions
· Super 8: materiality and imperfections to render memory fragile and affective
· Immersive shots: light, mobile camera to follow daily life
· Voice-over: subjective, poetic, intermittent
· Alternating rhythms: slow/romantic → realistic/grounded → fast/intense
· Inhabitant contributions: integrated dramaturgically to show the collective from within
Objectives and Artistic Intent
· To show the fragility and beauty of a place’s memory
· To capture collective life and intimacy in a threatened community
· To make the audience feel the emotional and social impact of eviction
· To experiment with subjective and collective cinema, where everyone has a voice and images
Director's note
This film was initially conceived as a distanced observation of a community and its relationship to the social and political context surrounding it.
However, after deciding to move into Républica Baco, the project gradually transformed into a fragment of my own life, oscillating between the intimate and the collective.
In July 2023, I traveled to Coimbra, Portugal, and was introduced to several républicas, including Républica Baco. Drawn by my long-standing interest in social movements and communities, I began filming and documenting these spaces.
In February 2024, I returned to Coimbra and spent three weeks at another Républica, where I met several residents of Républica Baco and began building a relationship of trust. Over the following year, I returned periodically to film the house and spend time with the residents.
Just before the summer of 2025, I dedicated several weeks to filming the house and conducting interviews. Soon after, I decided to move in to fully participate in collective life. That July, the University of Coimbra, owner of the building, ordered the residents of Républica Baco to vacate within three weeks due to structural risks, without offering relocation or reconstruction plans. Since then, we have remained in the house, adapting to the absence of university support, including food deliveries and rent collection.
As my involvement deepened, the film shifted from a school project or external observation to an intimate, immersive account of life within the community.
Director
Apolline Weinstein
Apolline Weinstein is a video artist trained in cinema in Paris before joining ERG in Brussels, where they studied videography. They began filming social movements in Paris before developing documentary work with communi- ties, notably in Spain. Their filmmaking practice is rooted in an immersive approach, attentive to forms of collective life, social struggles, and threate- ned spaces, where image and sound become tools of memory.
Producer
Rita Sousa Rêgo
Filmmaker and cultural producer, Rita Sousa Rêgo has followed a path marked by artistic hybridity in music and painting before dedicating herself to the audiovisual field. With international training and experience in creative industries management and artistic mediation on the Catalan coast, she now focuses her work on investigating social and interpersonal dynamics. Based in Coimbra, she uses cinema as a critical tool and a means of communication with both territory and society.
