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.
