Bela Mandil

(Helena Estrela, Portugal, 2018)

It is said that in the Portuguese region of Bela Mandil, the echoes and phantoms of history – the murdered lovers who transgressed the warring lines of Christian and Muslim religions during the bloody struggle for the Iberian Peninsula in the 1490s – still linger.

Helena Estrela’s calmly intense, 18-minute film intermingles the current, daily activities of fisherman at work on the shore, with stylised glimpses of a tragic tale recalling Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931).

Must these romantic rebels separate, or accept a cruel death? The past and the present interpenetrate in sound, shadow and sea waves, playing upon an eternal landscape.

© Adrian Martin September 2018