I never truly saw myself as a director. I came from writing, from crafting stories, weaving voices, and building emotion through structure. But Virgínia demanded more. She didn’t just need to be written, she needed to be seen, heard, and embodied. It was her silence that forced me to listen. It was her absence that taught me how to frame. And it was her fragmented legacy that made me realize I had to direct, not despite those gaps, but because of them.

I first encountered Virgínia de Castro e Almeida in 2012, during my doctoral research on the absence of women filmmakers in Portugal. I soon realised that her erasure from History was not accidental, but the consequence of a life deemed “uncomfortable”: a woman of the high aristocracy, a “reluctant” feminist, divorced, accused of lesbianism, separated from her daughter, politically contradictory – impossible to contain within a simple narrative.

Born in 1874, Virgínia reaches us through a fragmented archive. This film is, thus, not built on a complete archive. We don’t have footage of Virgínia. We don’t know what her voice sounded like. But we do have her words – pages and pages of letters, books, essays, and one unproduced script. We do have photographs. We do have the feeling that she was here, and that she mattered… that she still matters. So I decided not to hide the gaps. I embraced them. Virgínia is an exercise in archival invention, a film that weaves absence into narrative, transforming what’s missing into meaning. In doing so, I want to create a plural, living archive (through writing, performance, gesture, sound, imagination), one that belongs not just to Virgínia, but to all the women who still struggle to leave a trace.

Visually and emotionally, Virgínia seeks to blur the lines between past and present, fact and fiction. Though structured in three classical acts, the film resists linearity unfolding instead as both a search and a séance. It conjures a woman erased by history back into presence through cinema itself. Hybrid in form and poetic in tone, Virgínia brings together re-enactments, personal reflections, historical fragments, and speculative visions, creating a politically charged space where the forgotten can finally speak.

As such, the aesthetic is shaped by texture, memory, and emotional resonance. Moments from the past, whether documented or imagined, are rendered in warm tones, soft grain, and fragile light, evoking the language of silent cinema and the impermanence of memory itself. Where images are missing, we turn to animation, guided by the drawings of Pamela Boden, Virgínia’s life partner. Through her lines, we give form to what history obscured: their love, their exile, the intimate weight of erasure. In contrast, the present unfolds in raw, naturalistic tones, as contemporary Portuguese women filmmakers – the “Virgínias of the present” – step into the frame. They are not experts, but co-authors. Their voices, gestures, and reflections become the connective tissue between centuries, as they respond not to certainty, but to a woman they never knew, but now somehow feel.

Lighting also marks this transition between eras. Sound design underscores the tension between what is known and what can only be imagined. Voiceover, built from Virgínia’s own words, is delivered by the women of today, their voices becoming the vehicle for a woman who never got to speak on screen. The music is spare, fragmented, echoing the very structure of the film. The camera follows the rhythm of discovery. Slow, observant, respectful. It listens. It waits. It lets spaces breathe and absences speak. It does not impose meaning, it offers room for feeling.

Virgínia belonged and belongs to the world. Her life crossed borders – Portugal, France, Brazil – and so does this film. With deep connections to archives, institutions, and artists in all three countries, and others, I am trying to shape an international co-production rooted in shared memory and shared acts of resistance. Because this film should speak to audiences beyond questions of gender or national history. It is not “just” the story of one woman. It is about how history is written, and who gets to write it back.

I’m still, in many ways, writing this film. But now I write with gestures, shadows, voices, silences. Virgínia taught me that sometimes, directing is another form of writing, a way of crafting presence when all you have is absence. She made me a filmmaker. And I carry her with me.