Image de Ville tries to create a “cultural and artistic space for films about architecture and urban spaces”. RUINS is part of a selection, proposed by Jean Pierre Rehm, general delegate from FIDMarseille, Marseille International Documentary Film Festival, where the film won the Georges Beauregard International Award.
The following description can be read in the festival catalogue: Which is the relation between places and memories? Which is the relation between stories and spaces? From a region to another, Manuel Mozos dives into time density and collective imaginary in Portugal. Nor monuments, nor strict documents, the texts, sonorous elements and uninhabited places revisited by Ruins, remain there but in a phantasmagoric way, now full of narrative meaning in confrontation with erasing and disappearance.
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.