Found Memories

"Found Memories" is not for everyone; it is for a very sensitive audience and for those who are artistically open to an interpretation of moments on screen which embody years of life of others. Other reviewers are right by writing that you cannot expect everyone to internalize such an emotional experience created with few words. The way it represents other human life in a place far away and removed from our lives appeals as a beautiful and very moving story we do not usually touch or approach every day.

This particular script did it with a sparsity of words and an amplification of gorgeous visuals. The beauty of the images that came with it, whether shown through photographs or through the movie itself, come together like a fantastic reproduction of the concert that is life. It resonates with me long after the movie is over.

I applaud the screenwriters, the director and the brilliant actors.

From the beginning, director Júlia Murat immerses us into this rural Brazilian village and its elderly inhabitants, and moves at their pace, which is to say, damn slowly (be forewarned). An old woman (Sonia Guedes) gets up early, makes bread, walks along the railway tracks to town, and provides them to an old man (Luis Serra) who runs a café, but not before having the same daily argument with him about who should arrange them in the display case. (Seriously, I think they showed that at least four times, which after the first two seemed a bit much). They pray in their rustic church with others, none of whom looks younger than 70, share lunch together, and occasionally mention some pretty dark things that have happened in their lives - children or other loved ones dying. It's more than a little touching to see the old woman writing a daily letter to her dead husband, full of tenderness, and to put fresh flowers outside the cemetery gate for him.

One day, a young woman (Lisa Fávero) shows up and asks to put up for a few nights. She appreciates the beauty of the quiet little town and its people, saying she was "born in the wrong time," despite some of them harboring the outmoded view that as a woman she shouldn't be drinking cachaça, the local spirits. She's also quite a photographer, and the scenes which show the artistic prints she creates with her cameras are wonderful, my favorites in the film. I also loved the moment when the old woman posed nude for her - there was such power in her smile, and a quiet defiance of time. This is a meditation on aging, community, and weathering life's hardships that has a lot going for it. I just wish it had given us a little bit more in its story (or backstories), or had moved along just a wee bit faster, even if its simplicity and pace were the whole point.

In the past I seldom got excited about watching a film with an entire cast of ageing actors - until I came upon "Found Memories". With the exception of one young actress, playing a visiting photograph from a big city, the film consists of all old folks, many in frail health.

Life in this small village is repetitive, slow and mundane. And yet life goes on. Many of the ageing inhabitants have outlived their children, and past memories helped to fuel their will to live. The arrival of a young girl, a photographer, added a little bit of change to their otherwise uneventful lives. You sense the generation gap, and the gap between the past and the modern. But in the end this does not matter.

I could not help but care about some of the characters, and thought about them after the film is finished. Needless to say, I like this film a lot, and will be training my eyes on any future work by this brilliant Brazilian director Julia Murat.

This film is a beautifully photographed fable about a ghost village where no one has died since 1976, and where old people are stuck in their memories - until the arrival of a young female photographer changes things. It is also a melancholy ode to the heydays of the coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley, once the symbol of Brazil, and a flourishing region that prospered thanks to its coffee plantations, but now a derelict region full of empty estates and ghost towns. This wonderfully touching and melancholic story is beautifully shot, sweet and sour, honest and heart-warming. It shows Brazil as a country with many realities, and reflects one of these realities, one that often remains untold. The film is very well acted, slow at some points, but it definitely stays with you after it ends. It is also a fantastic reflection on the passage of time, a poetic, humble film about the last people left in this small village, people full of hidden memories and set in their ways. As the worlds of the young and old intertwine, the dichotomies between resistance and understanding, and between labor and art begin to fade (like the old photographs hanging on Madalena's walls). Through a growing relationship, each teaches the other about life and about the importance of not letting it slip away. A real gem!

This Brazilian film has some amazing cinematography, including several scenes seemingly lit only by lantern that are truly unique and impressive. I don't know how the DP pulled it off, but I'd like to know! It's about a small, dying community in rural Brazil where only the old-timers remain, due to death or diaspora. The setting seems from another century until a very modern city girl, infatuated with photography, arrives. Like other recent Brazilian films I've seen, this flirts with the language of magical-realism without resorting to it in any absolute way. However you interpret the narrative, the film implies that one's memories are only meaningful if one has someone else to subjectively interpret them- if one can become a story-teller. Indeed, time can only proceed if there is an other to testify to what has transpired, to what has been lost to time. Implicitly, then, life, being-in-the-world, is impossible without death or, as Derrida would say, unless there is an other to sift through the inheritance one leaves behind.