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Inspired by the letters written by pen pals and Portuguese poets Jorge de Sena and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, the director develops a filmic essay basded on their verses and excerpts. Film clips of staged encounters, archive footage and private videos combine to form a kaleidoscope of associative imagery. Under the Salazar dictatorship, Jorge de Sena had to flee into exile, never to return to Portugal. The two melancholy friends spend two decades writing each other "to fill years of distance with hours of conversation."
Meet the director
Rita Azevedo Gomes
Rita Azevedo Gomes' career dates from the early 1970s and spans cinema (with Manoel de Oliveira, Noronha da Costa, Werner Schröeter, Eduardo de Gregório, Valeria Sarmiento and others) theatre (Chekhov's The Seagull; Claudel's The Exchange; Sophocles' Antigone, Racine's Bérénice; etc.) and opera (The Fairy Queen, King Arthur, La Traviata, Idomeneo, Platée, The Carnival of the Animals, etc). For over 30 years she worked closely with João Bénard da Costa, first in the Gulbenkian Foundation's Cinema Department and then, after 1993, at the Cinemateca Portuguesa. During this time she established a solid reputation for her graphic design work in film catalogues and cinema-related publications. Her films have been screened at international film festivals - Venice, Montreal, Bafici, Turin, Viennale, Jeonju, Doc Lisboa, Marseille, Cinesul Rio - and distributed in Portugal, France and Spain. In 2014, Bafici organized a full retrospective of her work. Rita Azevedo Gomes works as a programmer for the Cinemateca Portuguesa. She also curates exhibitions and publications. She is now working on her next movie.