The Seasons

For her solo feature debut, director Maureen Fazendeiro, a longtime collaborator of acclaimed Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes — with whom she co-directed The Tsugua Diaries (TIFF ’21) and co-wrote Grand Tour (TIFF ’24) — embarks on a journey through time and space, exploring the region of Alentejo in Portugal. It was once a major tourist destination — famously, a site of ancient megalithic structures — but today it’s a somewhat deserted place.

To create this vivid, sort-of docufiction tableau vivant of the region’s human presence and geography, she employs — or better, excavates — every narrative device available to her, starting with the diaries of Georg and Vera Leisner, the German archeologists who first inventoried the fourth and third millennia BCE dolmens spread across the Iberian peninsula, and happened to be in the Alentejo region at the onset of WWII. Fazendeiro quietly retraces their steps, going further inland.

Voiceover entries by the couple open the narrative space to the shepherds, archeologists, and many, many goats Fazendeiro encounters, as well as to the songs and poems sung by local elders. The carefully layered and fluid structure of the film reassembles historic time in a poetic fashion where folklore intermingles with science, and her probing cinema of the passing seasons listens to the trees, the wind, and the timeless stones.

DIANA CADAVID