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OURO E CINZA / GOLD AND ASHES (2024 - TBC)
(in production)
Production: O Som e a Fúria
Development support: Instituto do Cinema e Audiovisual – ICA, European Cinema Support Fund MEDIA
Additional support: FLAD – Luso-American Development Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Camargo Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation
Support: Instituto do Cinema e Audiovisual – ICA, RTP
In sea-foam, in swirling and imaginings I am fish, tadpole, crocodile. I am an urge, an idea, a portent of impossible dreams. I lie between heaven and earth, between goodness and evil, patience and explosion.
Like a child in its mother’s belly, I am with you but not among you. I know no ending for I have no beginning. I have always been here, a child in the silence of things, ready to wake at any moment.
(…) All things are possible. When we speak in anger, anger will be our truth. When we speak in love and live by love, truth in love will be our comfort. Who you are is limited only by who you think you are. I am the word before its utterance. I am thought and desire. (…) There are words that exist only in the mind of heaven, a bright knowing, a clear moment of being. When you know it, you know yourself well enough. You will not speak. (…) I read the book of the river. (…) It is not vanity. (…) You will never reach the end of your own becoming, the madness of creation, the joy of existence.
In the womb before the world began, … There in the dark when we could not see each other’s faces, we agreed with one mind to be born, to separate, to forget the pact we made that we might learn the secrets of our fraternity. We agreed to know sorrow in exchange for joy, to know death in exchange for life. We were dark seeds of possibility whispering. Then one by one we entered alone.
I am a child, the seed in everything, … I am the name of things. (…) I am the dream changing before your eyes. Out of chaos came the light. Out of the will came life.
– Becoming the child, From awakening Osiris, the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
In a kind of “redemption” exercise, two women (mother and daughter) go beyond their limits in order to free themselves of their comfortable and suffocating lives.
Gold and Ashes is a film that washes you away. It is a film of metamorphoses and illogical choices – guided by the maladjustment in-adaptation that the characters feel and that only they can, or cannot, overcome.
Fragmented, elliptical and of hallucinogenic qualities, the narrative is perforated by unexpected moments of clarity and acumen.
Erected upon internal and external [ontological-epistemological] dualities [reflected in the characters but also in the time and space where the action is set, or in the world that they inhabit], and followed by the structure and other formalities [separate planes, theme], attempts to expose how our spiritual [conscious] existence shapes [is shaped by] the power and symbolic relations that we construct with the surrounding [environment] others [no matter their kinship] and how do these associations come together to produce [be product of] societies that [are] convey[ed by] civilisations.
Gold an Ashes’ matters of concern unfold around cognitive systems [thinking, knowing, remembering, judging and problem solving by means of language, imagination, perception, and planning], modes of knowledge conversion [socialisation, externalisation, combination, internalisation], models of communication applied to societal models [politics, culture, history, religion] and civilisational paradigms [capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy].
Gold and Ashes uses an approach that acknowledges human evolution [biology – reproduction, environment – ecology], affection, potential, aspiration, crafts and aptitudes, [fields of study comprised by humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, formal sciences, and applied sciences] while simultaneously outlining human limitations [freedom and associated responsibility, death, isolation, meaninglessness].
Only an atopian philosophy-a bizarre, extravagant, heretic philosophy-can rechannel our fear of the outside. A radical existentialism favours everything that challenges the compact immanence in which we are trapped, losing capacity to imagine political alternatives. We must occupy the voids with affection.