RUINS already received the Georges Beauregard International Award at FIDMarseille and the TOBIS Award for Best Portuguese Feature Film – at Lisbon’s International Independent Film Festival.
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.
The prologue is unambiguous: It is the spectacle of a high-rise block being blown up. Then there is a crowd in a cemetery, gathered around the grave of a certain Henriqueta Souza, a revered woman whose tumultuous biography is retold for us and who, as we are to learn, has kept the head of her dead lover as a relic. The aim of the film is clear: What is the relationship between places and memories and between narratives and spaces? Other sites and other buildings follow, all of which are abandoned: a silent neighbourhood, a restaurant, a theatre, a seaside resort, a church, an abandoned villa and a factory in ruins. Today’s inhabitants are invisible, so these places are situated in a time suspended by the exclusive power of the still. There are some live beings though, those of yesterday: Men’s and women’s voices, from one place or another, recite. They tell of the dishes of a rich 17th-century menu, partridge and broth; an epistolary exchange on the subject of debt; a list of obsolete medical protocols and even workers’ songs. Subtle variations on the close links between writing and spaces which subvert illustrative evidence and set traps for ordinary principles.
Jean-Pierre Rehm, in Viennale 2009 Catalogue