Ricardo Leite

Edila Gaitonde, born in the Azores, was the first Portuguese woman to marry a Goan of Indian origin during the Salazar dictatorship. Her husband was Pundalik Gaitonde, a freedom fighter who fought for Goa’s independence from Portugal. Edila was a fighter, piano teacher, radio presenter, documentary maker. She left us in 2021 at the age of 100, but it is through her that we will learn stories about an unknown Goa and a forgotten Portugal based on her accounts, photographs and dozens of previously unseen super 8mm films.

The sound was deafening. The noise of the machines, the steps, the daily hustle of the more than a thousand workers, entering and leaving the shifts. There were 12-hour days, people without holidays, a stolen youth so that the cloth would continue to leave the factory. The revolution came and everything changed. Strikes, picket strikes, worker’s rights. Then the globalisation came. The factory went down to close. We went back to it, with the former workers, the old and the young. The machines continue to work in the empty spaces, the ghosts wander illuminated by traces of light until the walls begin to fall.

One day almost everything turned into a pile of rubble and bush. There remained ghosts wandering through the fields, the ruins and the fog. Some of these ghosts are alive. They are those who stayed, those who came back, those who roam the difficult memories of the most cursed neighborhood of the city. Only that this Tarrafal, the name of the field of slow death of Salazar's dictatorship, is not in Cape Verde but in Portugal.

One day almost everything turned into a pile of rubble and bush. There remained ghosts wandering through the fields, the ruins and the fog. Some of these ghosts are alive. They are those who stayed, those who came back, those who roam the difficult memories of the most cursed neighborhood of the city. Only that this Tarrafal, the name of the field of slow death of Salazar's dictatorship, is not in Cape Verde but in Portugal.

This movie was directed in order to homage the poet Sebastião Alba, through Antonin Artaud’s poem “Pursuit of Fecality”. In this movie we can also find poems by Alba, as well as the director, Ricardo Leite.

In this film, Ariadne, still a young adolescent, climbs to a mountain in the island of Crete to meditate about a strange dream. The daughter of King Minos, still didn't meet Theseus, and she neither knows about his existence, but in her dream about a bullfight she thinks to recognize the figure of the hero in the strange character of the bullfighter. The music is a result of mixing the eletro acoustic music track from portuguese group BOIAR and a smal excerpt from Ariadne auf Naxos composed by Richard Strauss