A Metamorfose dos Pássaros

"When you can't remember, invent"

An astonishing piece of art, beautifully composed images, each one like a painting itself, A perfect symphony of all things that is cinema.

This is the most compelling film I have seen for a long time. Every word, gesture, framing, is perfectly judged. It is impossible to summarise or adequately describe. I strongly advise all lovers of film to watch this.

The Metamorphosis of Birds (A Metamorfose dos Pássaros) is a 2020 Portuguese film directed by Catarina Vasconcelos, blurring the lines between documentary, cinema, and drama. It is a poetic exploration of life, death, and familial relationships, particularly the nuanced perspectives of mothers, fathers, and daughters on existence and legacy.

The film uses stunning, dialogue-free visuals to weave a narrative about renewal and the inevitability of mortality. Through its meditative imagery and introspective tone, it invites viewers to ponder the beauty and fragility of life. However, its unconventional storytelling and slow pace may not appeal to all audiences.

While the film is undeniably thought-provoking, it leans heavily on abstract symbolism and artistic expression, which may resonate deeply with some but feel inaccessible or unengaging to others. As someone who reflected on its themes but didn't fully connect with it, I can appreciate its artistry without being captivated by its style.

The title of this review says it all. When I started to watch this film, it provided me with different multitude of sensations. It seemed like a poetic expression of camera, every scene creates an abstract art. No real dialogues between characters, only consisting of monologues of those characters portrayed in that film. This is a story of a family consisting of eight members, six of them are the children of Henriquez and Beatriz. The story is told through showcasing the nature and how it works, how we all related to the nature itself.

The most alluring thing about this movie is bold work of cinematography. Every frame is static and the objects in that frame moves so delicately that it creates some emotions to the viewers' minds. Every monologues of this film expresses the philosophy of life by comparing them with nature. It is an unorthodox form of storytelling through visual medium and I have to say, this is very bold one indeed!

Directed by Catarina Vasconcelos, the film narrates the life of a Portuguese family through various accounts, whether these letters, recordings, photographs or simply the artistic reinterpretation of some fact from the past.

Like other Portuguese filmmakers (Miguel Gomes, for example) the director Catarina Vasconcelos chooses to mix documentary and fiction, when reporting her family's biography and capturing with the lens the real subjects who starred in those narrated situations, but at the same time elaborating images almost surreal and filling narrative gaps with extremely deep philosophical reflections on family relationships. This has been a wonderful feature of Portuguese cinema in recent years, a factor that has earned many fans around the world, in addition to recognition at various international festivals.

Such fame is the result of the identification that we feel with realities so peculiar, but at the same time so similar to ours. When we enter the home of the family portrayed here, we observe a reality common to any family relationship. Parents and children experiencing a constant exchange of knowledge, in which children always have questions about various topics, and it is up to experienced adults to offer them satisfactory answers to this infinite range of questions.

In this regard, it is impossible not to be hooked by the poetic beauty of Metamorphosis of the Birds, when for example one of Catarina's brothers asks mother Beatriz something that moves her imaginative childhood curiosity: "do the plants think?". These are the moments that make this experience something unforgettable, since we are facing the formation of a human being's character and also the representation of a feeling that moves the world, that is, the constant search for meanings that give some meaning to life.

Such beauty seen on the screen also leaves us with a kind of moral responsibility, as the cinema of Portugal needs to be explored, especially by us Brazilians who, when watching any film produced in our former metropolis, observe in a language practically identical to ours a cultural formation quite different that, diverging from our Latin American society because it has beyond its geographic location, the history of a European country genuinely developed a cinema that is also subject to the artistic style of the old continent, so this cultural mix ends up resulting in what everyone we are passionate about images we seek ... Great films like this.