Fire of Wind is the surreal debut feature from Portuguese filmmaker Marta Mateus, which opens presumably in the present, as workers pick grapes in the summer sun and before one woman cuts her hand. We follow her trail of blood among the leaves and discarded feathers, until we find her again in a tree — trapped up there by a bull on the loose. The rest of the workers, and many faces and hands we haven’t seen also climb up, creating a whole world in the trees as night sets in. Mateus cuts from face to face, body to body, as they monologue amongst the branches, the raging bull kicking up leaves behind them. The film becomes a direct metaphor: of course the people need to return to the ground, to their fields, yet they are forced to live in constant precarity and a state of seeking refuge. From that vantage, all they do is watch.
Mateus uses an ample amount of reflected light, redirecting the sun’s beams against itself, creating harsh illuminations and flash-like portraiture in both broad daylight and night sequences. It is at first quite subtle: a grapevine a little brighter than it should be with its back lighting, or the space between bushels having a soft spotlight between its shadows. At first it could be mistaken for amateurish lighting, but as night sets in, its intentionality becomes clear; clear too is that it is the effect of a confident filmmaker. This kind of illumination feels indebted to the contemporary master of Portuguese cinema (and perhaps European cinema as a whole), Pedro Costa. Mateus is not merely a borrowing, however, but also delivering a bold iteration. Whereas Costa is often remembered for his interiors, Mateus stages her film entirely outside, showing us a strange world within the trees. Meteus’ world too is atemporal and aspacial — where the physical continuity of a space isn’t as important as its emotional contrasts, where people in wedding dresses can be seated in trunks near modern workers or soldiers from a war in the distant past.
Fire of Wind’s emphasis on the naturalistic is in stark contrast to all that looms around it. Deep in the night of the film, lights creep up over the horizon. A combine harvester cuts through the orchard at night. The peasants watch from the trees. “Nobody knows the land anymore, there are machines for everything.” The juxtaposition of a monstrous mechanism ripping up all the grapes that were so delicately cut by the hands of the workers is a brief moment in the movie’s runtime, but leaves a massive scar — as violent as the bull but oddly more indifferent. Even running from the bull, it seems natural to reach for the trees. But in the onlooking of modernity from distant groves, there is nothing but silent helplessness as far-off things sever connections with the physicality of the earth. Even if their labor was demanding to the point of being backbreaking, it was certainly not a world of alienation, one where the workers now find themselves unable to even plant their feet back on the ground.
Published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 2.
