Trails of Time

Each year FUSO invites the Department of Cinema/Moving Image at the Center for Art and Visual Communication, AR.CO, to present works produced over the past academic year (2024/2025).

Opening the program, Catarina Nogueira presents #1, filmed a metal structure located on the AR.CO premises. Through editing, she transforms the recorded images into visual and sonic rhythms that belong to a realm of enchantment.

Ricardo Grelha, with his The Dogs Bark and the Caravan Moves On, leads us to a parking lot. As the film unfolds, we become aware of the director’s careful manipulation of time. The filmmaker also took on the editing and post-production of this work.

The third film in the program is A River, Orange, As If It Were Fanta, also directed by Catarina Nogueira. The filmmaker shows us vignettes of landscapes. In these moving frames — or static frames in motion the images result from tracking shots or pans, from the wind shaking the camera, or even from the flow of a stream  — we glimpse traces of time. The film is constructed using archival sound and images.

The program closes with a film by Zé Castanheiro about the workers’ collective Associação Livre dos Trabalhadores da Barrosa. The starting point for this film is an audio cassette from the 1980s, and the place where its recording was made. The filmmaker brought a camera to the location and inhabited it, observing and filming. Listening and imagining time — the time captured in the audio recording; the time that has passed; the time he witnesses; and the fusion of these times, redrawn in this construction of sound and moving image.