Lonjuras
Director:
Chiara Cassaghi
Producer:
N/A
Production company:
N/A
Production country:
Portugal/France
Duration in minutes:
60
Contact:
Sinopsys:
Through a search for archival materials in remote and depopulated villages at the border between Portugal and Spain, LONJURAS explores how extreme centralisation determines what part of a population gets to see their memory become the records of their country’s history.
Long Sinopsys
Meimoa is a small town at the feet of a small mountain range that forms the border between Portugal and Spain. Surrounded by badlands, distances stretch across wild forests, abandoned fields, rocky historical towns and deserted roads. There are just about 300 inhabitants left in the depopulated village, far from the thousand-people mark it hit before the mass emigration waves of the 1960s. To face the challenges of population aging and loss, the local community endeavours to create activities to bring in new cultural life. During these gatherings, people happily answer questions and tell their stories. A widow offers to show her late-husband’s photos, taken with the cheap camera he bought right before being sent abroad, that no one had ever seen before.
Meanwhile, in Lisbon, the ANIM office assesses the results of their material collection campaign for the anniversary of April 25th. 50% of the Super8 films received come from Lisbon, the majority of the rest from other large cities or coastal population centres. However, there is a surprising quantity of material gathered through previous direct community efforts by the one individual in Viana do Castelo. « There isn’t a proper network with local administrations, we didn’t get responses when we publicised the campaign. » laments representative Raquel Morais.
Driving across dry badlands, we set off with some of the most active pillars of the community in Meimoa, in a mission to collect film and photographic archival material hidden in the villages across the Raia. The aim is to determine how much historical record is shelved away, with a focus on this unique region’s perspective on major events, recent paradigm shifts, and above all the wars and decolonisation.
Memory, as a component of culture, is also dependent on investments and political priorities. As large parts of the territories are pushed aside, so are the stories of their people. Exploring the topic of record and historiography is a way to analyse the wider issue of centralisation and how inaccessibility of services, infrastructure also impacts how the past disappears.
Creative Process
With LONJURAS, I have in mind a direct, immersive investigation 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. However, one of the components of the subject matter is quite sociological, therefore contextualisation through « expert » interviews should punctuate the main story (the research of material through direct community effort) to widen the perspective, bring elements to reflect on.
Obviously, this method contains the challenge of not knowing precisely in advance what obstacles or what stories will be encountered. However, based on a year of preliminary interviews and explorations, I believe the film can be structured around these points of view:
- the local community whose memory the film tries to access, including through the collection of oral event records, as well as the local administration whose task it could be to connect the area to central cultural endeavours,
- the ANIM and its mission within the Cinemateca Portuguesa, for the importance of conservation,
- decentralised film offices, for the structural challenges of designing a system inclusive of remote and rural areas.
Moreover, there is at least one homemade Super8 film depicting scenes of Portugal in the early years post-dictatorship whose owner has agreed to let me access, that I would like to follow in its process of being traced back and turned into historical record.
To go further, the landscapes of the Raia are views I am personally attached to, that I would like to allow space for in the film because its wilderness and remoteness are both the reason for its sociological situation and the essence of its identity. In following a search for material on the ground, with these light aspects of a road-movie, I hope to also place this territory often set-aside at the forefront, to film it in ways that don’t solely analyse its economic value, to reflect the film’s baseline that wealth or connection to the pillars of the globalised world should not be the condition for memory (or space in this case) to be worth conserving.
Some of my references in this approach include Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the light, for its attachment to capturing territory and how it intersects with time and people, and Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed for its dedication to letting its subject tell her story in action, and Frederick Wiseman’s In Jackson Heights for the way its editing puzzles together the portrait of a community.
Archive images being the topic of the movie, they will be featured of course, in following the process of them being collected, to reflect on the value they possess for us.
Director's note
With LONJURAS, I have in mind a direct, immersive investigation 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. However, one of the components of the subject matter is quite sociological, therefore contextualisation through « expert » interviews should punctuate the main story (the research of material through direct community effort) to widen the perspective, bring elements to reflect on.
Obviously, this method contains the challenge of not knowing precisely in advance what obstacles or what stories will be encountered. However, based on a year of preliminary interviews and explorations, I believe the film can be structured around these points of view:
- the local community whose memory the film tries to access, including through the collection of oral event records, as well as the local administration whose task it could be to connect the area to central cultural endeavours,
- the ANIM and its mission within the Cinemateca Portuguesa, for the importance of conservation,
- decentralised film offices, for the structural challenges of designing a system inclusive of remote and rural areas.
Moreover, there is at least one homemade Super8 film depicting scenes of Portugal in the early years post-dictatorship whose owner has agreed to let me access, that I would like to follow in its process of being traced back and turned into historical record.
To go further, the landscapes of the Raia are views I am personally attached to, that I would like to allow space for in the film because its wilderness and remoteness are both the reason for its sociological situation and the essence of its identity. In following a search for material on the ground, with these light aspects of a road-movie, I hope to also place this territory often set-aside at the forefront, to film it in ways that don’t solely analyse its economic value, to reflect the film’s baseline that wealth or connection to the pillars of the globalised world should not be the condition for memory (or space in this case) to be worth conserving.
Some of my references in this approach include Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the light, for its attachment to capturing territory and how it intersects with time and people, and Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed for its dedication to letting its subject tell her story in action, and Frederick Wiseman’s In Jackson Heights for the way its editing puzzles together the portrait of a community.
Archive images being the topic of the movie, they will be featured of course, in following the process of them being collected, to reflect on the value they possess for us.
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.
outros trabalhos:
Hmg!!217434
