At night, a voice evokes a fleeting memory of a song. What exists in the present of a memory that refers to the past? What visual correspondents do I find? Ours is the Wasteland searches for a no place and no time, in which an individual and collective memory rises like a thin thread that unites the fragments of an image. The formalism of the framing clashes with the documentary soundscape – an attempt at representation that meets the voice of a traditional popular song. All of this comes from a plastic desire to create a mise-en-scene that progressively becomes more aware of itself. In the beginning, there are objects in disjointed spaces; objects that face natural elements – a mirror shows fire, fabrics and photographs sway in the breeze. A mysterious and impenetrable atmosphere rises linked to the nature of the sung words and the act of reminiscence. In the end, only cinema remains: the secret, the impossibility of truly accessing that other time, is revealed – the implacable lucidity that everything is false and everything is construction. It is, at last, a film that seeks to record the materiality of present things under the light of a past that starts to fade. It is a film that starts and ends in its quality of trial and experimentation – presenting itself as a search and ending with the awareness of the impossibility of finding a definitive answer.

biografia

Mário Veloso was born in Braga on March 17th, 1998. After a brief passage through the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, Mário graduated in directing at the Lisbon Theatre and Film School. His first film, Rio Torto (2019), a documentary created in an academic context, was awarded with the Fernando Lopes Award for Best Portuguese First Film and Pedro Fortes for Best Portuguese film of the Verdes Anos competition, at the 17th Edition of DocLisboa – International Film Festival.

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