Lonjuras
Director:
Chiara Cassaghi
Producer:
no producer on board
Production company:
no producer on board
Production country:
Portugal/France
Duration in minutes:
60
Contact:
Sinopsys:
LONJURAS portrays the community in a remote and depopulated village on the Portuguese border. They are striving to keep their cultural initiatives alive, as well as their unique historical memory.
Long Sinopsys
Meimoa is a small and remote village on the Raia, the Portuguese border, which has been facing steady population loss for many decades. Emptied out most of the year, it becomes unrecognisable during the summer holidays with the return of entire families from abroad. However, during the misty, working seasons, the remaining people have to find ways to make their spaces come alive.
A repurposed elementary school, that until a few years ago was falling in disrepair due to the lack of children in the village, now hosts language classes for immigrants. The junta de freguesia has become the place to meet for book fairs, film screenings, group dancing and togetherness. Neighbours knock on each other’s door daily to pass good luck tokens, families meet for coffee by the river after lunch or dinner, there is a real need to combat isolation through community.
As the granddaughter of people who abandoned the village for foreign metropoles, I use my camera to immerse into these endeavours, to observe and capture the energy of this space, of people strongly turned towards the future but who are being cast aside as relics of the past by larger perspectives.
Inspired by recent initiatives for conservation of amateur historical archives, the film creates an opportunity to gather people in search for their collective memory, for the physical material as well as the human stories that are disappearing with the region : a widow’s photos of her husband’s time in the colonial wars, a Super8 film by a son of immigrants who only discovered his country after the fall of the dictatorship… Seeking to break the silence and distance that cause forgetting, so that this community — its history and identity — can be seen and heard, and then remembered in the way they truly want.
It is an adventurous journey through the badlands of the Raia, landscapes that can feel too vast, too empty, too wild but that are the foundation of the unique local cultural identity. It is a reflection on a border that became a margin, as well as the portrait of the complexities, challenges and relationships of a population often mischaracterised because of its history of rurality and poverty. LONJURAS deals with themes of decentralisation, the challenges of living in areas devalued by globalisation and modernity, but chooses to do so through the lens of collective initiatives and memory conservation.
Creative Process
CONFIGURATION
Set-up
With LONJURAS, I have in mind a direct, immersive approach to filming and editing. In documentaries, I prefer when the camera is an eye that follows spontaneously, borrowed by what it witnesses rather than the guide of it, and when the story is told through connection with the people captured rather than through the distant and neat framing of author narration. That entails a filming set-up that is light and free, because we need to immerse ourselves in the community, be flies on the wall but at the same time draw the stories out of people, create a dialogue with them.
Spaces, look and sound
There are two main worlds that will be filmed which are nature and urban spaces (the village mostly). The Raia is vast, wild and hostile but it’s also majestic in its own way. I want to capture that faithfully, both because I am personally attached to those landscapes and because they are at the root of the region’s identity and challenges.
As for Meimoa, there is a contrast that must be created between emptiness (streets all year long, misty mornings, roads, abandoned fields, vastness) and togetherness (praia fluvial, café, classes, festa de S. Domingos, houses, activities).
The Raia has essentially two faces: summer and the rest of the year. Since nature governs there, the seasons are really important and I would love the opportunity to capture the contrast between the two. Summers are pale, harsh, bright, rocky, arid, but also lively, noisy, vibrant and restless. On the other hand, the rest of the year is luxuriant, colourful, with incredible lights, but it’s eerily silent, misty, empty, sometimes ghostly.
That contrast is important in the soundscape. There are precise noises that are very characteristic of the place, such as the jingle of the baker’s truck that passes at nine in the morning every day, the whistling winds, the calm flow of the river, and then the complete opposite to that: the latest pop songs blaring from the speakers of the praia fluvial.
It’s not a place that obviously brings music to mind, it’s made much more of sounds and it could be an interesting choice to mimic that through sound design. Otherwise, though they are not much alive in Meimoa nowadays, there is a local tradition shared with the Spanish side of the Raia that includes adufeiras (songs with traditional percussion) or mata-aranhas (traditional group dances).
Device
The process of the collection initiative will require planning, it will comprise elements of cinéma-vérité, but also road movie and ethnographic-adjacent recording. The important thing is to coherently maintain focus on the community and the individuals, be it by setting up conversations, creating interactions with the physical materials, confronting stories with the places where they happen if they still exist.
MOOD AND TONE
A lot about the mood will be determined by what we will find as we film, which can’t fully be planned. Since it’s a community that oscillates between driving energetically towards the future and dealing with disappearance, the emotions that come with it are understandably contradictory and complex. I want to do them justice, but at the same time avoid at all cost forms of romanticisation, aestheticising nostalgia or falling in the traps of pathos. A community is a mosaic of human beings, not tools or symbols. The voice is theirs, therefore they guide the tone with their outlook.
Within the editing, I currently imagine a pacing that takes time to show the subjects, piece together textures, that doesn’t cut excessively except when it creates meaning, but that remains lively, raw, if imperfect at times.
ADVANCEMENT
Field work
Currently, the next development stage for the project is to start defining the characters that we will follow and observe. Through the preliminary work, I have already identified many interesting stories, and I believe that capturing as much as possible and letting the unexpected bring to light unique moments of individuality, humour, emotion is fitting for a project of this sort.
Some of the people with specific roles I’m interested in showing, maybe bringing on board for the search, are the multilingual teacher who repurposed the abandoned school, the president of the junta the freguesia who coordinates the community spaces.
Material
In terms of historical archives, which are the matter that helps the film reflect, I currently have located at least three photograph collections as well as two Super8 films, one which is already digitalised in the ANIM database and one which isn’t. That one belongs to my uncle, who made a documentary-style home movie the first time his father brought them freely around the country after the Revolution. Besides during the movie’s search, I also aim to find more, through other archival funds, such as Videoteca de Lisboa.
Editing will be important as well when it comes to including the material, studying it, confronting it with the present, creating connections and reflections.
Director's note
This project was born during the research project for my previous documentary (HOMENAGEM, 2025, 78’) which also dealt with the Raia and the native villages of my grandparents, but that sought instead to understand the reasons for the region’s desertification. During that process, I searched for archive material to illustrate a sequence about the colonial wars, despite my limited budget, and I was convinced it would be impossible to find some from Meimoa because the families in the villages where extremely poor at the time, who could afford a camera? I was proven wrong thanks to a door-to-door community effort by one of my cousins, and discovered not one but three private photo collections of local boys who had been sent to Angola. No one had ever seen this material before, and I was struck by the way it seemed to show a different perspective than what I had encountered in official archives: there was a stunning amount of pictures of armament, dozens of rifles laid out in piles, boys posing in front of massive machine guns or tanks. It made me wonder: does a soldier from a remote, extremely rural village photograph the same aspect of war as someone wealthier, or from a big city? And therefore, is historiography incomplete if we only get one point of view?
Those questions were the starting point for a year of preliminary research, pre-interviews, on-the-field discussions and observations.
One of the things I discovered was that my preoccupation was shared by offices whose mission is the conservation of historical material, such as ANIM in the Cinemateca Portuguesa. They confirmed to me that they can observe a stark difference between the material they receive from coastal urban centres and from the backcountry. For example, during their recent collection initiative for the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, they were sent very few Super8 films from rural areas. The only one that could be relevant to the region I’m filming comes from Covilhã, which is almost 1h drive away from Meimoa going towards the coast (and a lot more urbanised). However, another part of our discussion inspired me to develop the central device for LONJURAS: they were able to collect material from a specific town in Viana do Castelo thanks to the efforts of one man to bring the initiative directly to his community.
Knowing how little reach there is in the Raia for these projects, I designed the possibility to carry that mission there myself and to use it as an opportunity to give the local community the spotlight they wish for.
Indeed, as the grandchild of emigrants from the region, the Portugal I know is represented almost exclusively by these depopulated villages and vast no-man’s-land at the border with Spain. The local community is my family, their neighbours, people I’ve known since I was a child and who I would always listen to when they shared their stories. Through making HOMENAGEM and researching for LONJURAS, I spent a lot of time as a witness to big and small cultural gatherings in Meimoa, even helping organise a movie screening (which involved a lot of inviting people directly by knocking at their door). I watched the community evolve in the past five years and cherish their drive to reimagine their future. For that reason, I had the idea to use my position as a semi-outsider, as an observer and as an artist to turn the camera towards them.
The purpose of the film is to question the effects of centralisation of culture and memory, to give the stage to an area whose history is disappearing because of population loss and aging. It is both a conservation gesture and a tribute to people left in the margins of the hypermodern world.
Director
Chiara Cassaghi
Born in France from a Portuguese mother and an Italian father, Chiara Cassaghi graduated from the École Supérieure d’Études Cinématographiques (ESEC) with a degree in screenwriting. She started her career in 2018, in documentary film development and television programming, then embarked on her directorial debut project : Homenagem. Her projects, both fiction an documentary, often focus on historical or geographical themes and their impact on the daily lives of everyday people.
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