Cinema
Down to Earth
Casa de Lava
Pedro Costa · 1995
Synopsis
A nurse from Lisbon accompanies to Cape Verde a labourer who fell from scaffolding and remains in a coma, whom the hospital sends back home. Once there, she finds no one to claim him. She stays, settles in a village of ash at the foot of the volcano, treats people who ask for nothing, and clashes with a Portuguese woman established there for years who distributes a dead man's money.
Context
The film was born of an abandoned project: the filmmaker wanted to remake Jacques Tourneur's Vaudou in the archipelago, and wrote another screenplay on the spot. He has said that he wanted to leave a Portugal whose politics disgusted him, and that he asked his producer Paulo Branco for the means to go and shoot in Africa. Filming took place on the island of Fogo, in thirty-five millimetre, with Emmanuel Machuel behind the camera and islanders in most of the roles; the production brought together Portugal, France and Germany. At the outset, the island's families loaded the filmmaker with letters and parcels for their emigrant relatives.
Who it is for
A hundred and ten minutes, in Portuguese and Creole. The film proceeds through held shots, silences and fragments, without explaining what connects its characters: you have to accept not understanding everything.
Prizes and reception
Shown at Cannes in 1994 in the Un Certain Regard section, but never distributed in the United States before its restoration, thirty years later.