Skip to main content

Xcèntric 2019

Fundamental principles: Ana, by Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis

The CCCB's cinema

Audiovisuals

In Ana, the second film made by Reis and Cordeiro in Trás-os-Montes, the grandparents safeguard houses and the kids play, astonished when they discover each new substance – mercury, a prism – while avoiding all timelines or conflict. Places, gestures and traditions remain in immediate and adequate visions, with no psychology or symbolism.

A flash-back of five thousand years. This is how Joris Ivens described the scene in Ana, where an ethnologist relates the ancient customs of Trás-os-Montes with those of ancient Mesopotamia. It’s about an internal look at a land whose inhabitants are geological deposits and in whose landscapes, filmed as if they were cities, there doesn’t appear to be anything anonymous: as Serge Daney wrote, each tree, each track, each stone could have its own name. The waters of Euphrates flow through the Duero.

Chant to a land, two women, a name, a language; precise dreams and transposed nightmares during the day. Ana was filmed over three seasons and five years. The level of demand that the filmmakers focused on the dialectic between images and sounds led them to achieve a great sonorous, primitive (fire, wind, flood) proximity, to oppose materials (wool, silk, milk, light) and to conceive shots as independent units, linked by means of correspondence between shapes, materials or fabrics in a montage that relates dimensions that are temporary, spatial, chromatic, emotional.

Ana, António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, 1982, Portugal, 35 mm, 114 min

Directors: António Reis, Margarida Cordeiro

This activity is part of Xcèntric 2019

Related contents

See all the content

Xcèntric. Programme January - February 2020

Érik Bullot, Su Friedrich, Storm de Hirsch, Edward Owens, Amy Halpern, Masao Adachi, Igor and Gleb Aleinikov, Yevgeny Yufit, John Smith, Karpo Godina, Noémia Delgado or Juan Bufill are some of the filmmakers featured in our programme January- February 2020 of Xcèntric. 

Watch the video

Xcèntric. Programme January - February 2019

Jan Švankmajer, Rudy Burckhardt, Margarita Cordeiro and António Reis, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Carolee Schneemann, Stan Brakhage, Christine Noll Brinckmann, David Brooks and Arthur and Corinne Cantrill are some of the filmmakers featured in our programme January- February 2019 of Xcèntric. 

Watch the video

You might also be interested in

Collaborators