“It is said in Alentejo, when something is lost, those who are looking should start to walk back to the beginning. Farpões, Baldios, a fulgurous first film by Marta Mateus, undertakes such a walk. It is an account of dispossession, of wastelands that were once part of the commons, and of the people who have been living and working in these lands without ever owning them. It takes place in the south of today’s Portugal, but the struggle is old and you might be familiar with it: “They didn’t die out of love. It was a fight.”

It is a matter of transmission and resilience, (hi)stories told (hi)stories heard. The children are now free to wander the fields, and in their wanderings they play and meet their elders. A way of life is enunciated by the men in the dark of the barns, almost a litany. “Now we weed. Then the pruning. And we sow the carnations.” But the labor we see is performed by women: peeling vegetables, collecting firewood, conjuring exorcisms. For those who care to look, this landscape is charged with presences. (Sílvia das Fadas)

Portuguese with English subtitles

The Magicians of Wanzerbé was produced in the course of a scientific mission in Niger in 1948-1949 and was considered by Jean Rouch as his first ethnographic film. He documented the “principal rituals of Songhay magicians who are descendants of emperor Sonny Ali, from the village of Wanzerbé in the Niger Bend area. The Wanzerbé market, children’s games, Mossi the magician, the magician’s dance, sacrifices made to the village mountain spirit.” It was the first film that showed Western spectators that the powers of the Sohantyé magicians of the Songhai land were not just the product of a collective illusion.

French with English subtitles