A Festa e os cães

Leonardo Mouramateus has edited this multiple-first-person essay with the tentative self-assurance of his walks home after a night out in a deserted Fortaleza, when he would bark to ward off stray dogs.
Here, the dogs barked at by the voice-overs are nothing but the desertions themselves. His pal Dani has gone to live in Lisbon, and the filmmaker himself has also left—the only family member in exile apart from his uncle Mauro (the eponymous character of his documentary screened at the 2013 Cinéma du réel). All he has left is a bundle of photos taken during the last six months of his life in Fortaleza. Both derisory and elegiac, these snaps with their shadow overexposed by the flash recall the less poetic memories—a chum beaten up by a bouncer, inebriated dancing in a garden swimming pool… Nor can the camera that took them boast of any technical noblesse, its plastic casing having condemned it to a life as ephemeral as the joys of a party before Dani begins to vomit. Here, no punctum, as Barthes understood it to mean in his Camera Lucida: it is not a matter of identifying something in the photos that “prickles” us, but of witnessing a looped lapse of time as in Telefon Tel Aviv’s song “The Birds”, which Kevin listens to on his bed. Returning to his post-adolescent years in this way, the filmmaker-Orpheus has thankfully documented nothing. Instead, he has created a poetic comet—a “lo-fi” kaleidoscope in which he manages to watch himself grow up. (Charlotte Garson)