The dictatorship in Portugal (1926-1974) is the world’s longest anti-liberal, anticommunist, and authoritarian system. Its creation is connected to the name of Prime Minister Antonio de Olivéira Salazar and the activities of his famous political police, the PIDE. It is still painful for the Portuguese collective memory to remember the past: the regime of horror ended nearly forty years ago, yet dealing with the trauma and delivering a moral judgment of the actions committed as a result of force, or out of fear or cowardice is still problematic.
Susana de Sousa Dias deploys a radical method: she confronts ex-political prisoners with their picture taken in detention, and asks them to evoke their past. Alas, us, the audience, never see the faces of the storytellers. Even so, the voices filled with emotions tell a lot about their reactions, and their feelings: the silences and background noises give us much more than mere ambience. They tell a big part of the story. The particular method transforms victims into witnesses, whose stories reveal the working mechanisms of a murderous power.
2009 | Portugal | 93 min | Susana de Sousa Dias | www

[<<]

[<]

[>]