“The Metamorphosis of Birds”: Portugal’s Oscar candidate arrives at RTP – Atualidade in January
“The Metamorphosis of the Birds” is RTP-2’s first ‘gift’ to its viewers in 2022.
Catarina Vasconcelos’ film is scheduled for 5:24 pm on January 1st, less than three months after its premiere in movie theaters.
Nominated by the Portuguese Academy of Cinema as the candidate for an Oscar nomination for Best International Film, some international awards at festivals and will also be released in 2022 with another four titles on Netflix, as part of a partnership with the Portuguese Academy of Cinema.
With 101 minutes, “The Metamorphosis of the Birds” is the director’s first feature film and had a world premiere in February 2020 at the Berlin Film Festival, the first of more than 60 international festivals she has attended.
According to the distributor, in 2020 it was “the Portuguese film with the most appearances in festivals around the world and the most awarded”, namely with the distinctions for Best Film at the Vilnius Festival, in Lithuania, and the Special Jury Prize at the Festival de Taipei, Taiwan. It also received the Best Film Award at the Dokufest Festival, in Kosovo.
Distribution in Portugal was twice delayed due to successive confinements in times of pandemic, debuting on October 7, totaling 13,135 viewers, according to data from the Instituto do Cinema and Audiovisual.
The film starts from the childhood and youth memories of several family members, but Catarina Vasconcelos fills some narrative spaces with fiction and an aesthetic imagery that combines painting, photography, staged compositions, full of symbolism.
Catarina Vasconcelos, 33, took six years to create this film, after making her first short film, “Metáfora ou a Tristeza Virada do Avesso” (2013), in an academic context, in London.
The two films come together in formal and thematic aspects, and are interconnected because Catarina Vasconcelos filmed a family, addressing the relationship of her parents and her mother’s death, in the short film, and the love story of her grandparents and her death. paternal grandmother – whom he never knew -, in the feature film.
Between fiction and documentary, “The metamorphosis of birds” concretely summons the family ties of a father and a daughter – the director -, rescuing the past that unites them, through the relationship of the paternal grandparents of Catarina Vasconcelos and in particular of the grandmother Beatriz, who never met.
The film starts from the childhood and youth memories of several family members, but Catarina Vasconcelos fills some narrative spaces with fiction and an aesthetic imagery that combines painting, photography, staged compositions, full of symbolism.
“I wish that [o filme] was about this family, but that I could talk to other people. (….) The time it takes is almost the time it takes me to get out of myself to reach others. I managed to free myself from my family and the fear of inventing about them, so that I could invent at will. This was very important, “he told Lusa agency when the film was shown at the Berlin festival, where the International Federation of Film Critics (Fipresci) Prize was included in the Encounters / Encounters section.
Catarina Vasconcelos spoke of “a highly intimate and personal process”, in the conjugation of sound and image editing, indebted to a relationship that the director has with the visual arts, and demined as “a very analogical thing, of bricolage”.
There are shots that look like animated paintings or photographs, staged and metaphorical visual compositions, full of symbolism, about the passage of time and the omnipresence of nature.
“All this side, which comes more from the visual arts, was very important and the film could not have been built elsewhere. These were the solutions I found to respond to things I felt”, he explained.
“A Metamorfose dos Pássaros” was produced by Pedro Duarte and Joana Gusmão, with financial support from the Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual, RTP and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
TRAILER “THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE BIRDS”.