'Ninth screening of the film programme Manoel de Oliveira e o Cinema Português 3, parallel to the third part of the exhibition of the same name. The screening will feature João Botelho's "Aqui na Terra" (1993), presented by professor and researcher Tiago Vieira da Silva.

15 APR | WED | 5PM

AQUI NA TERRA

Teresa Villaverde | POR, UK | 1993 | 105'

The story of Miguel, a successful 40-year-old economist who, immediately after his father’s death, finds himself in a labyrinth of fears, noises, and utter loneliness. Unable to understand what is happening to him, he quits his job, isolates himself from his wife in his own home, and, in a process of physical disintegration, allows himself to be surrounded by terrifying sounds and a vague sense of catastrophe until he finds emptiness, nothingness. Then a light, the Light, causes him to stagger and fall into an irremediable vertigo that is resolved only in the transcendence of a sacred place. And, at the other end of this earth, the story of a crime and its atonement. António and Cecília, accomplices in a murder committed in the name of the love that unites them, suffer in body and soul the justice of the heavens. Labor, mutilation, and wandering for António; isolation, humiliation, and abandonment for Cecília. Until the moment when, in that very same sacred place, they discover life as a magnificent gift and not as cursed servitude, ultimately obtaining forgiveness from the heavens. From death to the miracle of life, here on Earth.