Virgínia is a film about absence: about what was never shot, recorded, or preserved, and about how cinema can still create presence from the void. The project is born from the tension between the desire to film Virgínia’s story and the impossibility of doing so conventionally. The scarcity of moving images, the absence of her voice, and the fragmentation of the archive compel the film to reinvent its own means. But rather than conceal this limitation, the creative process transforms it into a methodology: not to reconstruct the past, but to create a space where it can be reactivated and interrogated. How do we work with the gaps in the archive, rather than against them? How can these silences become cinematic tools, rather than obstacles? These questions drive every creative decision. The gaps are not what the film works around – they are its very fabric.

Virgínia treats memory as poetic matter, weaving together interviews, archive, imagination, performance, and re-enactment. The project rests on a hybrid logic that articulates historical investigation, artistic creation, and contemporary presence. The archive – photographs, letters, texts, documents, and the sole surviving film – is treated as unstable matter, never as sealed evidence. Each fragment functions as a trace, summoning more questions than answers, and assuming its role as a dramaturgical element.

Animation occupies a central place in this process. Inspired by the drawings of Pamela Boden, Virgínia’s life companion, hand-drawn animation gives form to an intimate, affective space that was scarcely documented. Without any pretension of factual explanation or reconstruction, it functions as the film’s emotional extension, making visible the love story, the shared daily life, and Virgínia’s inner world.

Between the hybrid and the lyrical, archival material evokes silent cinema, while the re-enactments – including Virgínia’s ghostly apparitions – are performative and deliberately artificial. They do not represent events; they activate states of absence, waiting, rupture, and resistance, questioning the boundary between memory and fiction in a dialogue between devices inspired by films such as Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell. The contemporary filmmakers do not appear merely as interviewees, but as active presences: bodies that read, listen, imagine, and respond, mediating Virgínia’s voice through a choral device. Together, they build a living, emotional, performative archive, one that is deliberately incomplete, shaped by absences made visible. In embracing what is missing, the film challenges conventional ideas of the archive, authorship, and truth in cinema.

Visually, the film alternates between the textures of the past and the contemporaneity of the Virgínias of the Present. Family testimonies emerge in a light almost suspended in time, while the present is filmed in a more naturalistic register, reinforcing the idea that history is not settled, but being rewritten now. The sound design is made of silences, breaths, and overlapping voices, where sonic absence is as meaningful as the spoken word. Like memory itself, the narrative is fragmented and emotional.

Virgínia also speaks to a transnational history of women in cinema. Her life unfolded across Portugal, France, and Brazil, and the film seeks to reflect that legacy – resonating across borders through shared silences and shared acts of resistance. Inspired by works such as Merata: How Mum Decolonized the Screen, Women Make Film, and Who is Bárbara Virgínia?, the film stands in a genealogy of projects that reclaim the presence of women in film history. But it is also a film about now – about the forces that continue to shape who is remembered and who is erased.

The film’s culmination – the production of Noblesse, a screenplay written by Virgínia and never filmed – crystallises this method: investigation becomes creation, and artistic gesture becomes symbolic reparation. A century of silence finally finds its form.