The Cinematheque

“Trails summons comparisons to Sergei Parajanov as both an avant-garde picaresque of theatrically staged folktales and a quasi-ethnographic study in storytelling traditions.”

Michael Rowin, Artforum

João César Monteiro arrived at his first feature via film criticism. Seeing the work of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, which transforms non-fiction shooting methods (namely ethnographic portraits around the rural Trás-os-Montes region) with mysteriously associative montage, Monteiro declared their impact on Portuguese art to be ​“as fundamental as the grafting of a new heart into an agonized patient.” Trails, also shot in Trás-os-Montes, made one key change: it is unabashedly dealing with fiction. As if rewriting a Portuguese epic from beginning to end, the film braids the ancient (voiceover) and contemporary (performance) with ephemeral shifts in magic-hour light cast over centuries of ritual and stories within stories. Pasolini’s baroque, vagrant approach to myth is one comparison, but Monteiro’s methods—burying plot in one location and unearthing poetry a few steps away—willfully charts its own course. Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights later continued the tradition.

In Portuguese with English subtitles

“Monteiro’s temperament is essentially poetic, and so his narratives obey rhyme above reason … Each shot of Trails is a fresh draught of the Portuguese countryside’s variegated natural beauty.”

Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice