Trás-os-Montes at the Film Workshop Düsseldorf: A poetic cinema experience
Date and Time
Location
About this Event
Mood
Venue Type
Trás-os-Montes: A poetic labyrinth of Portuguese cinema
The Film Workshop Düsseldorf presents on November 19, 2026, António Reis’ and Margarida Cordeiro's groundbreaking docufiction Trás-os-Montes. The film, created in 1976, takes viewers to the remote northeastern region of Portugal and combines ethnographic observation, oral tradition, staged scenes, and poetic image compositions into a unique cinematic experience.
Landscape as memory and myth
Trás-os-Montes unfolds as a journey through villages, landscapes, and spaces of memory. Reis and Cordeiro focus on Bragança, Miranda do Douro, and the people who inhabit this region. Real and invented stories, folkloric motifs, and the cycles of life merge into a cinematic weave, where landscape is not merely a backdrop but a bearer of collective memory.
A new language between documentary and fiction
The 111-minute film is one of the early and stylistically defining examples of Portuguese docufiction. The direction, screenplay, and editing are by António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro; the cinematography was done by Acácio de Almeida. Residents of the region appear as amateur actors, embodying both variations of themselves and their ancestors.
The aesthetic experience arises from the tension between documentary accuracy and mythical elevation. Sounds, faces, materials, and spatial transitions create an exhibition atmosphere in the cinema hall, where artwork reflection and cultural education intertwine. Jean Rouch described the film as a fabulous labyrinth that reveals a new cinematic language.
António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro
António Reis was one of the central voices of Portuguese Novo Cinema, combining his work as a filmmaker with a poetic and ethnographic perspective. Margarida Cordeiro, a trained psychiatrist and director, developed together with Reis an independent form of poetic documentary. Their joint work examines memory, folk culture, social reality, and the relationship between humans and landscape.
Trás-os-Montes became a reference work of Portuguese cinema and influenced subsequent generations of filmmakers. The international reception particularly highlighted the combination of aesthetic radicality, ethnographic attention, and political sensitivity.
An artistic experience for explorers of cinematic seeing
The screening is aimed at everyone who understands film as visual research, poetic landscape experience, and cultural encounter. Between painting, installation, and documentary observation, the film develops its own spatial effect: images appear as fragments of an archive, voices as traces of an oral history, movements as rituals.
The audience should not expect conventional narrative cinema but an intensive reflection on time, origin, and memory. The film screening at the Film Workshop Düsseldorf thus opens a concentrated access to an important art movement in Portuguese cinema and to an extraordinary form of cultural education.
Conclusion: Experience Portuguese film art live
Trás-os-Montes promises a lasting artistic experience between documentation, myth, and poetic fiction. Anyone seeking the aesthetic experience of a cinematic journey through landscape, history, and collective memory should not miss this rare screening at the Film Workshop Düsseldorf.
Official channels of Film Workshop Düsseldorf:
- Instagram: no official profile found
- Facebook: no official profile found
- YouTube: no official profile found
- Website: https://www.filmwerkstatt-duesseldorf.de/
