Notice that this documentary had already received another prestigious prize – the TOBIS Award for Best Portuguese Feature Film – at Lisbon’s International Independent Film Festival, last May.
RUINS intertwines the reading of varied texts (newspaper articles, recipes, commercial correspondence, medical prescriptions) with fragments of spaces and times, remains of eras and places inhabited only by memories and ghosts. Places that no longer make sense, that are no longer necessary, that are no longer fashionable. Forgotten, obsolete, stark, empty places. This film doesn’t pretend to explain why they were created or why they existed, nor the reasons why they were abandoned or transformed. It only promotes an idea, somehow poetic, about something that was and still is part of this country’s (hi)story.