Suspended Between Heaven and Earth, Past and Present, Myth and Reality: On Marta Mateus’ Fogo do Vento

Gijón lies along the Bay of Biscay, in the province of Asturias, on Northern Spain’s Costa Verde. It is indeed verdant, this region, with its gently rolling hills and winding roads that recall Ireland when seen from above. The city itself feels at once very Spanish and not: this is one of the numinous faces of Spain, far from the major urban centers or holiday haunts, that doesn’t conform to the resilient stereotypes that would reduce the country to a fraction of its topographical, cultural, architectural, culinary, temperamental, and idiomatic diversity. On certain days in the off-season, say, when the clouds are especially heavy and cumulus, the tides choppy, and the wind wet and chilly, Gijón possesses an air of woozy maritime drama, resembling something of a fairy tale. Which makes it an ideal place to tuck into a cozy cinema and dream. The Gijón International Film Festival, or FICX, whose 2024 edition ran from November 15-23, facilitated this impulse repeatedly with its wide-ranging selection of often bold, artful films from around the world, mostly from early to mid-career directors. My favourite selections were the ones that seemed geared, above all, to transport the viewer to highly specific locations where strange phenomena burgeon and one’s sense of chronological time becomes unmoored.

Perhaps the most potent example of this was Fogo do Vento, or Fire of Wind, the poetic, beguiling feature debut of writer-director Marta Mateus, which draws elements of myth, dream, and history into a group portrait of agricultural workers. With its static camera that cedes all motion dynamics to its non-professional actors, its sound design awash in the ambient drone of its open-air setting, and its sotto voce testimonies that sometimes evaporate before reaching an ostensible conclusion, much of the film possesses hypnotic, almost somnambulistic hues, which can seem to elasticize its 74-minute runtime. I can’t imagine Mateus would be altogether offended if you were to doze off for a spell while watching Fogo do Vento, not only because the film seems to encourage slumber, but also because its insidious overall effect is likely to follow you into unconsciousness.

An austere homage to people who work the land, Fogo do Vento opens with a series of handsomely photographed scenes of a vineyard harvest, only to interrupt the process when one of the labourers cuts herself, her blood makes contact with the soil, and an escaped bull turns agitated and begins stalking humans, driving everyone up into the cork trees for safety. It may seem to stretch causality to suggest that a few drops of blood in dirt prompted the bull’s ire, but Mateus’ storytelling, with its nod to Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees, traverses the boundary between realism and fable so fluidly as to invite such notions. Once those labourers are in the trees, they stay there, many of them speaking to each other or to themselves or, perhaps, to Mateus, in tones akin to internal monologues, diary entries, correspondence, or prayers. There is painterly attention paid to hands and faces. No lighting equipment was used: all illumination is reflection. The highly presentational way the subjects address the camera is an arresting hybrid of chamber cinema and epic theatre that cannot but remind viewers of the work of Mateus’ fellow countryman Pedro Costa, who serves, not incidentally, as one of the film’s producers. But couldn’t we use more films that capitalize on innovations forged in the work of Pedro Costa?

Filmed in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal and inspired by the oral traditions that persist there, Fogo do Vento is at once modern and timeless—by which I mean that Mateus’ approach is in dialogue with the modern, while her story luxuriates in things that don’t change and makes a palimpsest of the past and present. All of this is seamless: we begin in the now, yet over here dissidents to the dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar wander into frame, and over there World War I soldier João de Encarnação—Mateus’ great-grandfather—enters the film in search of something. Meanwhile the intelligence driving the film quietly revels in the presence of an untameable beast. This is a film about porousness and suspension. Things accumulate, rather than develop. There will be some viewers who will need to exercise patience with this film. Me, I’m the sort who gets happy about surrendering to a trance state if a work of art creates such a space. In any case, Fogo do Vento is slowly, quietly making its mark. It won Best Director at Coimbra Caminhos do Cinema Português and in Gijón, we, the FIPRESCI jury, gave it the Special Jury Prize. I’m very curious where Mateus will take us next.

José Teodoro
@FIPRESCI 2024