Portuguese filmmaker Maureen Fazendeiro’s latest work, The Seasons [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Maureen Fazendeiro
fiche film], which has premiered in the main competition of the Locarno Film Festival, emerges from an unusual intersection of archaeology, oral history and local myth. Cineuropa spoke with Fazendeiro about her playful, multi-form approach to storytelling, her use of oral traditions as a living, transforming element, and the political resonance she finds in poetry and song.

Cineuropa: When did you first encounter the Leisner archives, and what made you feel there was cinematic work to be drawn from them?
Maureen Fazendeiro: It began in 2015, with a newspaper article about Georg and Vera Leisner’s work titled “German Was Once Spoken at the Dolmens in Alentejo”. It layered time in a fascinating way, as these researchers in World War II were studying monuments from 10,000 years ago. I knew nothing about archaeology then, but like many children, I’d always been drawn to it. I was intrigued by the idea of filming a landscape while revealing the invisible layers of time beneath it. I started by visiting the Leisner archives, then travelled to Alentejo, retracing the researchers’ steps. I met locals who shared stories of how they inhabited the land. The Leisners had approached it scientifically, but the people living there had their own narratives. That’s when I began thinking about “landscape” as what you see and “territory” as how you make a landscape yours. I wanted to explore what it means to own land, not only in a material sense, but through memory, imagination and the stories we create to make a place our own.

Did you have a script?
A kind of script. Before the pandemic, I spent a period only writing. Afterwards came three years of shooting, with writing in between. I might film a shepherd at work, record a legend he told, like a woman appearing at a certain stone, then write a fictional scene inspired by it and have the people around him perform it. I wanted to document the imagination of the locals, making them both the authors and the actors of their own stories.

How did you approach creating the film as docu-fiction?
I don’t differentiate between documentary and fiction; I make a film. For me, shooting a landscape is the same as shooting with actors. Sometimes I prepare even more for the landscapes, especially for the precise panoramic shots. We spend a lot of time choosing the exact location and deciding what we’ll see. The découpage is often more elaborate for the landscapes, whereas in fiction, I improvise a lot, with the light, the actors and the people who happen to be there at that moment, working with the energy we have.

Was this approach planned from the beginning?
From the start, I knew I wanted to make a film that explored many ways of telling stories, so fiction was always part of it. Early on, I learned that there were legends associated with these places, so I knew I could have both a scientific reading and a mythological reading. That was already a great motivation to shoot. It was also great fun to make because the way I was shooting was never the same. As a filmmaker, I learned so much. I had the chance to experiment with many different ways of working, which was amazing.

Can you elaborate on those experiments?
I was able to try a huge tracking shot along a stone, or do fiction segments with goats and non-professional actors, bringing them close together. I didn’t want to make a film confined to one genre or one aesthetic; even if I think of the movie as a coherent whole, it contains many different filmmaking approaches. I wanted to play with that. A very important reference for me was Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon. It has this playful way of integrating real-life documentary material, with people working, alongside the stories and legends they tell about their country, engaging with the imagination of the people. That was important when I began thinking about my own film.

Why did you decide to shoot on 16 mm?
I’ve always worked on film; I think it’s an amazing medium. And because this was a work about time, and about how, since the dawn of time, we’ve tried to write ourselves into material things, it felt essential. I wanted to work with the materiality of film. Later, I found some unprocessed archive reels from between 1976 and 2018. The time they spent undeveloped left visible marks on them, and the material looks like a cracked painting. I wanted to embrace that.

How did you approach depicting Portuguese history without making the film explicitly political?
I didn’t want to make a historical or partisan film. For me, the political is already in the poetry, in people’s songs about the cooperatives, in the legends. Poetry and song are part of how the community comes together, how they remember and resist. To me, that is deeply political, but also poetic.