Pitoes, a village of Barroso

Pitões, aldeia do Barroso'' –Pitoes, a village of Barroso'' – (1979) is a Portuguese documentary feature film directed and produced by Ricardo Costa.

History

It’s part two of the tetralogy Homem Montanhês (Mountain Man). It portraits the inhabitants of a remote village of northern Portugal, on the mountain chain of Barroso. still keeping secular traditions such as communal cooperation.

The result is an intimate narrative with no story in which you feel involved as a discrete observer, lead by the eye of the camera. So you can watch wisdom and fraternity in daily life, haunted by ageless friendly spirits. As we could see in Nanook of the North, by Robert Flaherty, fiction is out of the game, this is «pure cinema».

Pitoes is an ethnographic film made with no scientific method, a free incursion in visual anthropology, intended to be followed by anyone. Introduced in Portugal in the sixties, salvage ethnography flourished in the seventies. Many of these films, which are now living “documents” of patrimonial interest, will also remain as original examples of a genuine art of filming.

Sinopsys

«Sheltered from the cold winds which blow across the mountains, on a green valley of the Barroso chain, in Trás-os-Montes, Pitões da Júnias is one of the last Portuguese villages keeping in activity a system of mutual help, of communal management and exploration of collective patrimony: the village council, the bread oven, the shepherd, the cattle fields, the “ox of the people”

In this old community, built on granite rocks, live people who have ever lived there and others: old emigrants from everywhere in the world, who built their lives abroad but decided to spend their last days in the place where they were born. Here they left friends, children and grand-children, with whom they enjoy spending their time telling stories and talking about life. Besides, there are literate children in the village now, playing the game, sliding timidly into the story.

To survive is to know how to face violence, how to live with it: how to kill and flay a lamb, for instance, or how to live with another kind of violence, more eloquent: a giant’s fight, the kind of fight we see between the village bulls. It is impressing. It explains the open smile of the ambassador of the US, who came here as a simple visitor. From one situation to another, from shot to shot, a portrait of everyday life is drawn, of unique and secular moments, still older than the faces of the men who live in this place: vulnerable, threatened in their wealth, vanishing in the mirror. Living people, they live in a fainting world, where time flows softly away, like the slow waters of the river. Just their portrait will be left.» (Cit. producer press-release).

Credits

• Production year – 1979
• Format – 16 mm colour
• Lenght – 86’
• 2d feature film of the tetralogy Homem Montanhês (Mountain Man)
• Production: Diafime with R.T.P. (Rádio e Televisão de Portugal)
• Director – Ricardo Costa.
• Colaboration – Prof. Viegas Guerreiro, Parque Nacional da Peneda-Gerês, C.M. Montalegre
• Laboratory – Tobis Portuguesa
• Location – Pitões das Júnias
• Premiere – RTP, 1979
• Festivals – 10th International Film Festival of Santarém (Portugal, November 1980), 10th Internacional Film Festival of Figueira da Foz, (Portugal, 1981)

See also

• Visual anthropology
• Ethnographic film
• Documentary film
• Cinema of Portugal

External links

• Pitões. Aldeia do Barroso – producer’s web page (English, French and Portuguese)
• Pitões. Aldeia do Barroso at IMDb

pt:Pitões, Aldeia do Barroso