Film “Alma Viva” is Portugal’s candidate for an Oscar nomination | Movie theater
The film Living Soul, by Portuguese-French director Cristèle Alves Meira, is Portugal’s candidate for an Oscar nomination in 2023, the Portuguese Film Academy revealed this Monday. This feature film was the most voted among the members of the academy to compete for a nomination for the Oscar for Best International Film in 2023.
Living Soulproduced by Midas Filmes in co-production with France and Belgium, it is Cristèle Alves Meira’s first feature film and premiered this year at Critics’ Week, in parallel with the Cannes festival.
The film, a microcosm about family ties, emigration, mysticism and Trás-os-Montes culture, was invited to shoot in Junqueira, in the municipality of Vimioso, where a producer with maternal roots; and the filming, made in the summer of 2021, relied mainly on non-professional actors from the locality.
Living Soul centers on Salomé, a girl, the daughter of Portuguese emigrants in France, who spends the summer in a village with her grandmother, with whom she has a strong emotional and spiritual bond. Salomé will witness her grandmother’s death and suspects that she was poisoned by witchcraft by another woman in the village. As the family organizes the funeral, Salomé believes she is equal by her grandmother’s spirit and tries to avenge her death.
“The story was completely inspired by powerful and mysterious stories I heard by the fireplace. These are almost like the archaic memory of Portugal, the matrix of the transmission of our culture and I wanted to go back to these traditions and tell these stories of world culture”, Cristèle A Meira à Lusa on the eve of the history of world culture.
The film is also a portrait of Portuguese emigration, of the families that are separated between those who stay and those who leave, and the social and economic differences that are born there.
Daughter of a Minho and a Trás-os-Montes native who emigrated to France, Cristèle Alves Meira maintains a connection to Portugal and her origins and assumes that this film has an autobiographical bent, even though it is a fiction.
In addition to Living Soulthe members of the Academia Portuguesa de Cinema had four other films to vote on: wolf and dogby Claudia Varejao, Bad Livingby João Canijo, Wind Debrisby Tiago Guedes, and Mayan Willow – The implicationby Sergio Graciano.
The 95th edition of the Oscars is scheduled for March 12, in Los Angeles, United States.