“O Casarão”: documentary about seminarians recalls memories of closed Portugal yesterday – News
In the middle of the “forest” there is a mansion, today at the mercy of the will of a caretaker and the population of Aldeia Nova (in Ourém) as part of a collective memory, a gathering of ghosts from a not distant past that continues to haunt and fascinate. Former journalist and now director and producer Filipe Araújo accidentally noticed the building’s construction, even before discovering that he had more connection with him than he could have imagined.
The story begins even before the production of the documentary “O Casarão”: the search for the unknown bibliography of his father, a university professor who died in 2008, resulted in a “hidden” revelation that he had attended a seminar.
The information was revealed to him by a blog of former seminarians who had been colleagues of his father’s and did not stop there: letters were also revealed that allowed Filipe Araújo to continue his journey to meet the lost woman and the so-called Casarão. And the meeting here with António, neighbor and caretaker, and the conversations and conversations about events and memories about to fade away, created the idea of making a film that would preserve everything.
“’O Casarão’ turned out to be an excuse to be with him [pai] and get to know a deep side of him […] It wasn’t my initial intention to make a film about a seminar, it all proceeded in an organic way. The idea I had of a seminar was transmitted by Vergílio Ferreira’s ‘Manha Submersa’, a book that ended up generalizing the image of seminars in Portugal”, said Filipe Araújo to SAPO Mag.
The reality that he came to know turned out to be quite different from his imagination: that seminar “in naming other seminars, was a very cosmopolitan space. There were Vietnamese professors, for example, and even the dean came from Canada, and there was an opening to the world of cinema through the embassies […] The paradox is that these ‘children’ ended up discovering freedom within walls”.
All this in a closed country, socially lagging day after day, in the “heyday” of the Estado Novo. Given this reality, the seminar was an important point of progress, contributing to the village being one of the first to have electricity and roads in the region. And yet another paradox in relation to the space formation objectives, that of creating “conservative parish priests”, there was equality between men and women (“This reality does not enter the film, because I only discovered it later”).
As a provocation, or as an accidental record, Filipe Araújo captured the latent conservatism in ecclesiastical sermons, heard at a Sunday mass, claiming the duty of submission from woman to man, in the way that man is submissive to God. This reading, supposedly representing the traditionalism of the family, found a rivalry in the seminar’s intellectual, sentimental and humanistic openness.
“O Casarão” is a film with several voices in unison and Filipe Araújo creates a collective narrator, an experience of a fusion between correspondences, both from his father and other seminarians, and from the sapicious and juicy words of writer João de Melo (from the book “ Happy People with Tears”).
According to the director, the documentary “talks about the fragility of memory […], of a memory that is disappearing”, and in this way, in addition to approaching the history of the building, it materializes the ghosts that still walk around there. A memory that resists being forgotten.
TRAILER.