30. Film Festival della Lessinia
Bosco Chiesanuova (Italia)
23 August - 1 September 2024

Italian premiere

Ana Maria lives in Paris, far from the heights of Bustarenga. Every summer she returns to the mountains of her childhood in the Portuguese hinterland, where her grandmother lives. Her questions about love and the search for the príncipe encantado stimulate the curiosity of those who have always lived in the village: Ana asks for advice from the women of her family, listening to their love stories, testimonies of a past that has never elapsed and perhaps not too different from its present. Both director and protagonist, Ana Maria Gomes extends this private self-portrait to a representation that involves the entire community, crossing the border between fiction and documentary. Courtship, marriage, divorce: the love encounter and its rituals are often consciously staged, as underlined by the television images inserted in the story. In an attempt to make two only apparently antipodal visions conflict, Ana will become part of a generational diary that photographs her, once again, among the stones of Bustarenga.

• 

  Ana Maria Gomes

  Ana Maria Gomes is a Franco-Portuguese artist and filmmaker. Trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, she made her first short film in 2004: Simomem, the portrait of her 14-year-old brother.