The Seasons: Transforms Land into Time

Since her debut short feature Motu Maeva, all the films of Franco-Portuguese director Maureen Fazendeiro have interrogated time and its entanglement with space, people, and stories. The Seasons, this year’s Portuguese entry in the Wavelengths section of TIFF, follows the same line of exploration in a landscape which reveals itself to be more permeable to fiction than we might expect. Or as the billing at the Locarno film festival, where the film had its world premiere, puts it: a “poetic reflection on history.”

“I began to want to make this film immediately after Motu Maeva and I think the idea remained with me in everything I’ve done in the last ten years,” Maureen Fazendeiro muses. “Then in a newspaper article I learned the story of Vera and Georg Leisner, a couple of German archaeologists who made a survey of the megalithic monuments of the Alentejo region of southern Portugal. They lived and worked in the region, a place I’d never visited before wanting to make this film. It struck me as a story worth investigating. Above all, the field journals kept by the Leisners helped me find my way around and locate the sites they’d studied on the map. From their collected correspondence I learned how in the 1940s, during the Second World War, they’d be busy unearthing the secrets of the dolmens – portal tombs that have stood for 10,000 years—while all the time news would be reaching them of the destruction of another German city.”

Travelling the Alentejo in the footsteps of the Leisners, Maureen Fazendeiro met archaeologists, goatherds, beekeepers, children (and the rabbits they play with). “All of them taught me how to ‘read’ a place that I gradually came to discover as I filmed it. And with that, the arc that interested me took form, between present and past, between now and a very remote then.”

A journey through the “real and invented history” of the Alentejo and its people, The Seasons is a delicate, spacious film that drapes itself easily over the landscapes it visits and the stories that shape it. It isn’t a drama, but neither does it follow the narrative structures of the conventional documentary. Instead it presents a collage of various elements, testimonies, layers of knowledge. The rhythms of the film suggest a long gestation period. “I called it The Seasons because when I started to organize my filming schedule, I divided it into seasons. I pictured four chapters. Except the passage from one season to the next isn’t always clear in the Alentejo, there are December days that feel like spring. And over the years, my relations with the Alentejo were becoming less and less linear. I decided to embrace that in the edit.”

Maureen Fazendeiro was born in a Parisian suburb, the daughter of Portuguese immigrants. Drawn to the Alentejo by curiosity, she found herself following the trail of a husband-and-wife team of archaeologists who, on their arrival in Portugal, “went around the countryside asking people where certain monuments were. Now, my relationship with Portugal is like that too, rather oblique, I belong here and I don’t, I feel Portuguese in some ways and don’t feel Portuguese in others, it’s half real and half invented. So I decided to examine this feeling in my film, picturing an ‘invented Alentejo’ through the stories people told me as I moved from one place to another. The poems they know by heart. I used their words, their stories, and the way they told them.”

Time is not linear in this film. It spreads and percolates; and part of the charm of The Seasons lies exactly in this, the way time ramifies, like the branches of the gigantic cork tree in the film’s closing shot. In the middle of one story there appears a character who embodies this diffuse chronology, a mythical figure and fugitive who goes by the name of Charro, played by a professional actor (Cláudio da Silva). It isn’t clear which era Charro is living in, nor from which era he came. “He could be a character from the time of the Carthaginians,” concedes Fazendeiro. “Or a man on the run from the men in black in the days of the dictatorship. We dressed him as a 19th-century bandit. Embracing the uncertainty.”

Francisco Ferreira
Edited by Robert Horton
©FIPRESCI 2025