O QUE RESTA
Portugal, Austria 2015 | 16mm | 39 min | documentary
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O que resta is a dream. A barely 40-minute, dusky dream: the kind that you have no idea of who or what you were in it when you describe it later. Were you the one who was looking? Or the person being looked at? Were you the hearing, movement, breathing? After all, you were there! And while you recall the emotion felt in the dream clearer and clearer, the concrete elements slip away. The body and subjects, it seems, were only forced in place anyway. Spreading out in the empty space behind: affect.
Jola Wieczorek’s film O que resta comprises three acts: in the first, the picture remains black while a voice reads. A son out in the field writes to his mother, fearful that he will not return home. The camera pans, while further letters follow, about the polished floors of an old apartment in Lisbon. The movement is oriented backward, a receding, perhaps a departure from these heavily memory-loaden walls with their copper etchings and photographs. In the second act, an elderly woman prepares for a visit. Her movements are routine and weary, she’s done them a thousand times: putting out the coffee pot, smoothing the bed cover. What would the cover und kettle be without her hand? In the third act, the future of the second becomes a certainty: the movers come and marks remain from cupboards that have been moved away from the wall. A young man writes from England. His first journey abroad, he is excited: girls wear short bathing suits.
Who are you in this cinematic dream situated in multiple times? The boy, the girl, the elderly woman who once received the letter? Or the young couple with the child whom the real-estate agent shows through the apartment? What remains is a film image of empty rooms, sunlit for the first time: and a final, mechanical pan of the camera to a framed picture that no longer hangs on the wall.
(Text: Maya McKechneay / Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt)
CREDITS
Director & Producer: Jola Wieczorek
Produktion: DocNomads
Director of photography: Rita Laranjeira
Writer: Jola Wieczorek, Margarida Cardoso
Tutor: Margarida Cardoso
Line Producer: Angela Sequeira
Production Assistant: Silvia Coelho
Camera Assistant: Soraia Rego, Miguel Reis, Gonçalo Dias, Joana Magalhães
Steadycam: Samuel Tavares
Editing: Jola Wieczorek
Color Correction: Marco Amaral
Visual Effects: Rui Braz, Diana Pacheco
Direct Sound: José Sequeira, Asia Dér, Luis Luz, Jola Wieczorek
Sound design and mixing: Júlio Pereira
Poster Design: Fatima Moreno
DISTRIBUTION
Sixpack Film
FESTIVALS+SCREENINGS
Diagonale
Crossing Europe
68th Locarno Film Festival
Framout, Vienna
4x2 Dokumentarfilmtage IV, Vienna
Doclisboa
Österreichische Kurzfilmschau 2016
IIFF - International Intangible Heritage Film Festival
dot dot dot short film festival, Vienna
Curt'Arruda Film Festival
NOMINATIONS
Nomination Silver Eye Award at Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, 2015
Nomination for the Prémio Sophia Estudante by the Academia Portuguesa de Cinema.
PRESS
Der Standard, 19th of March 2015
indieWIRE, 6th of November 2015