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Director and cinematography: Ricardo Leite
Script: Ricardo Leite, Eloy Enciso
Producer: Pedro Neves
Editor: Eloy Enciso
WATCH TRAILER
︎︎
Director and cinematography: Ricardo Leite
Script: Ricardo Leite, Eloy Enciso
Producer: Pedro Neves
Editor: Eloy Enciso
WATCH TRAILER
︎︎
Shot in film and hand processed by the director for over 20 years, Lucefece mixes personal, political and mythical views on reality exorcizing old ghosts. Stories from the director’s childhood, together with conversations with his father, that fought in the colonial war in Africa and later was arrested, prepare the scenario for a profound reflexion on today’s world. The film spirals like a snake travelling through time, an eternal recurrence, mixing documentary with film essay and autobiographical tones.
“The first narrative path came from the will to venture into the stories and legends that populated an entire region bathed by the mysterious river Lucefece in Alentejo, in the south of Portugal. The film was already being born on a fragile border between experimental and documentary cinema. This fragility was noted not only in the central, deeply anthropological theme, but also in the way it was triggered, building on it a series of reflections of documentary matrix. Lucefece can be summed up to a subjective portrait of the world, through my eyes as a director both as real and fictional character in the film itself. War, violence and death are the three main subjects explored, which simultaneously represent a big part of my childhood. In the course of a film about my life, we slowly start to understand my attitude towards violence, art and politics. We cross different dimensions, which include mythical, autobiographic and political lines. Through mythology, we travel between the other two lines. (...) This three lines create many layers of perception between past and future, and the nature of reality and time. But it is the confrontation between opposite subjects, such as the celestial and the infernal worlds, the East and the West, the North and the South, that marks the film's narrative. Life and death, love and hate, joy and sadness are elements constantly juxtaposing, meandaring like a river into the sea, and from the sea to Space.“
(Ricardo Leite)