Ana

"Women directors are a rarity in Portuguese cinema, although there are a couple of first works in post-production at the time of writing. But the filmmaking team of Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis has produced a number of films since Jaime, their 1972 debut. Ana is a marvelous introduction to their surreal vision of the world. Lyrically photographed to capture the atmosphere of the region in which the film is set, Ana is a portrait of a simple, selfless grandmother, filtered through the memory of her grownup granddaughter. Childhood memories, incomplete and half-remembered - the return of a young girl in the middle of a storm, the walk the grandmother takes to a lake - combine to create a timeless, almost liturgical tone. Rejecting the traditional conventions of narrative cinema, Cordeiro and Reis concentrate on incident and form, celebrating the darkness and somberness of the primitive mountain people whose lives are briefly interrupted by a team of ethnographers. 'Let us guard ourselves against looking at the film as if it were a simple ecological requiem advocating a return to nature. The cinema of Reis and Cordeiro has reached a crucial point in which categories like nature, civilization, rural, and urban are condemned to lose their aesthetic relevance. Only knowledge remains. This cinema knows. Ana is a film that has entirely conquered the time and space it evokes.' -João Lopes"

-Piers Handling in the 1990 Festival of Festivals Program