Ao Norte

An emigrant musician can’t recall the stories of his birthplace. A mother keeps the restaurant open, hoping her son returns. A cowboy wonders what’ll become of his cows. A widow cares for a chapel no one visits. And the oldest woman remembers everything—especially that—Estantegas. Under the burning sun, a strange figure roams the empty landscape of Portugal’s Minho with a boom pole, meeting the remaining inhabitants and capturing their memories on a sound recorder. An ethnographic ghost documentary about a future of a place that belongs to the past.

The premiere in La Rochelle held deep symbolic and emotional significance: it is the festival co-founded by Jean-Loup Passek, now the stage for the first screening of a film that celebrates his legacy and the heartfelt connection between France and Portugal, between Melgaço and the world of cinema.

In Melgaço, a transmission tower may be built, or it may not. On the horizon, the wind farms of Alto Minho. A vast landscape where everything and nothing changes, according to the eyes and the memories of its inhabitants. Recording these stories in a fragmented film diary woven from ephemeral encounters, three Brazilians follow literal and imaginary lines that lead them through the freguesias of Melgaço, from earth to sky.

The voices that emerge from the shadows of words scrape the liquid skin of memory. Fragments of tradition in breaths of silence. Living bodies that walk through time Only to imagine. Slow fluidity, creation that transforms between gestures and absences. The changes do not scream—they whisper. Now the horizon shaped by eternity and dirt flows slowly. It transforms. It persists.

Three strangers arrive at Ribeiro de Baixo, a village on the Minho border, where mysterious night lights foretell the death of its inhabitants. In the silence of the valley, Áurea and Umbelina spend their days watching over the cattle across the border, sharing stories of encounters with wolves and ancestral customs. From France, the grandchildren arrive and casually join the village in witnessing the twilight of a generation and a way of life.