In place of Aparecida, an industrial area in the North of Portugal, the annual festival that takes place on August 15 is being prepared. The andores (portable platforms) are decorated and the coffins in which they will be, according to a secular tradition, lying penitents are already prepared. The new priest, however, wants to end the tradition of promises to do the “burials”. Conflict is inevitable. This is a film that tells the story of the promise payers to Lady Aparecida, her longings and personal histories, reflecting on traditional religiosity and official religiosity, tradition and modernity.

biografia

Catarina Alves Costa is a director and anthropologist. Among other films, she directed Margot (2022), Viagem aos Makonde (2020) Pedra e Cal (2016) Falamos de António Campos (2010) Nacional 206 (2009) O Arquiteto e a Cidade Velha (2004) Mais Alma (2000), Swagatam (1998) Senhora Aparecida (1994) and recently co-directed Um Ramadão em Lisboa (2019). Graduated in Social Anthropology, she received a Master’s degree from the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, as a fellow of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and a PhD from Nova University of Lisbon with the thesis Camponeses do Cinema. Representations of Popular Culture in Cinema Portuguese. In 2000 she founded with Catarina Mourão the producer Laranja Azul where she produced films by Daniel Blaufuks, Sílvia Firmino and João Ribeiro, among others. She is an Assistant Professor at Nova University of Lisbon and Coordinator of the Master’s degree in Anthropology – Visual Cultures and the Audiovisual Laboratory, FCSH Pole of the Center in Network in Anthropology / CRIA. She organized for the Portuguese Cinematheque in Lisbon / Cinema Museum the Ethnographic Archives of Margot Dias filmed in Mozambique and Angola between 1958 and 1961. She also teaches at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil, and at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Barcelona. She received among others the Best Documentary Award of the Recife Ethnographic Film Festival (2019), the Critics Award from Caminhos do Cinema Português (2009), the Planéte Award at the Bilan du Film Ethnographique (1999), the Society for Visual Anthropology American Anthropological Association Film Festival Excellence Award, USA and the 1st Prize of the FESTIVAL VII Rassegna Internazionale di Documentari Etnografici (1996).

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