QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM INDIELISBOA

Parish-turned-city Póvoa de Santa Iria, just in the outskirts of Lisbon, is the director’s birthplace, as well as this film’s prime location and its protagonist. While not promoted as such, Santa Iria is presumably a documentary. The ephemeral characters remain unnamed, and little attention is paid to their life stories. It is the urban landscape sheltering these people that concerns the 47-year-old director, on his debut feature.

This non-narrative movie, flirting with slow cinema, opens with various sequences of automobiles driving across the busy motorways and streets of the unsightly, industrial city. They have to wait a long time before they enter the roundabout, merge or turn the next corner. It all looks like an orchestrated ballet, conducted by the non-identified motorists and their four-wheeled proxies. These images are supported by a score of symphony and classical music. While this may sound grandiose, the music barely connects to the subtle traffic developments. It feels like a random mish-mash of sounds and images.

Peculiarly, there are very few passersby on the streets of sleepy Santa Iria. Most of the sound and the life comes from the moving vehicles. Mucxh like a human body with running blood and yet no vital organs to be replenished.

Next we meet some residents of Santa Iria as they go about their lives. A youth team practises football, their physiotherapists ensuring that their muscles remain strong and capable. Church-goers attend mass and mingle afterwards. Industry workers discuss their lives and livelihoods. The elderly play dominoes (in a set repeatedly shown in reverse, for no apparent reason). Airplane model operators fly their devices in an open field, flirting the roofs of the houses underneath. This is perhaps the movie’s most cathartic experience, when characters almost break away for their suffocating mundaneness Correia is very keen to emphasise this by clumsily inserting a jaunty adventure tune to the flying toys.

Cryptic title cards break the film into rough chapters, however there is no linearity. The opening text is extremely long and difficult to remember, others refer to the nature of filmmaking, seemingly alluding to the director’s own quest for structure. One of them explains: “Santa Iria is the microcosmos, black and white is the macrocosmos”. The relation between this confined little world and the rest of society is constant yet tenuous.

The homemade-style cinematography also seeks to animate the banality, to inject the nondescript and transient settings with a warming sense of familiarity. The movie possesses one single moment of haunting beauty: a towering factory billowing heavy pollution into the skies. Santa Iria is the city we’ve all seen from our car window while heading elsewhere. The problem is that you wouldn’t want to spend a long time in such place without a clear objective, and that’s exactly what the Portuguese filmmaker does to his viewers for three interminable hours. This is a journey too personal and esoteric to be universally appreciated.

Incidentally, “iria” ia the conditional present tense of the Portuguese verb “ir” (“to go”). In other words, the film title means “[I] would go”. A accidental example of nominative determinism. This is a place one would only go under a set os established conditions. Santa Iria is not your typical destination choice. It’s a transient city, one that’s barely noticeable to the unsuspecting drivers.

Santa Iria just premiered at IndieLisboa, as part of the National Competition strand.