Terra Ardida | 2018
(Burnt Land)
Portugal was hit by major fires in 2017. Among many villages that were almost destroyed, Fajão, a shale village located in Pampilhosa da Serra, touched the director personally. This is the land of his grandmother, a small village where he spent his holidays since he was a child and that until this year had been spared immense fires - a feat that the inhabitants attribute to Nossa Senhora da Guia. What state will the village be in now and how will the few inhabitants be? Why did faith fail this time?
On March 24th 2019, the Sophia Awards 2019 took place at the Estoril Casino in Lisbon.
The film "Terra Ardida" won the Sophia Student Award, competing with three other films in the same category at the Sophia Awards 2019, awarded by the Portuguese Film Academy.
This film was also selected from more than 80 candidates at the Sophia Student Awards 2018, where it won the 3rd Place in the Documentary category.
Concept
The director, Francisco Romão, a former student of ETIC - School of Technologies, Innovation and Creation, in Lisbon, had to present a film proposal for the documentary module in his film course in 2017. It had only one conditioner, it had to be a portrait. Francisco decided to present a proposal in which a village was the protagonist; in which the film would be about a collective rather than a singular one.
Fajão, a shale village located in Pampilhosa da Serra, northern Portugal, becomes his choice because it is the village where his maternal grandmother was born, where his mother lived some years of her childhood, and where he also spent many vacations since he was little . This village with less than 250 inhabitants was razed by the fires of 2017, devastating fires best known for being the biggest recent tragedy of killing 64 people in Pedrogão Grande.
Initially, the director presented the proposal with more than a possible strand in the argument. There were archival images of the director when he was small, walking and running through the streets of the village, there were popular tales about the village, small myths, the fires, and also a very important Catholic figure for the villagers of Fajão, Nossa Senhora da Guia (Our Lady of Guia).
Later, after having formed a team to produce the film, he decided together with the other members that the focus would be on the village and the testimonies of the inhabitants who went through the tragedy, thus avoiding complicating the argument and hindering public perception.
Team
Francisco Romão - idea, director, color grading and editor
Luisa Pereira Santos - producer and sound operator
Rúben Fajardo - director of photography and camera operator
Gonçalo Caboz - original soundtrack
Daniela Carvalho - sound post-production
On the news
“Terra Ardida”, a documentary made by Francisco Romão and his respective team, will be part of Plano Nacional de Cinema.
ETIC is the first school to have a film produced at a curricular context in the PNC.
“Considering the educational and cultural benefits derived from this disclosure of Portuguese cinematographic patrimony among the educational communities and on the context of this initiative, some cinematographic pieces that constitute the list of films in PNC were selected for the 2019/2020 school year. The film “Terra Ardida”, by Francisco Romão, produced on the context of ETIC’s HND course, is part of that list of pieces and was selected for the “short list” of cinematographic pieces to be displayed from 2019/2020 in sessions destined to the students of the schools participating in the project.” – mentioned Elsa Mendes.
The Plano Nacional de Cinema (PNC) is a joint initiative of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and made operational by the Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual (ICA), the Portuguese Cinematheque (Cinemateca Portuguesa) – Museum of Cinema and by Direção-Geral da Educação (DGE). PNC displays national cinematographic pieces among school audiences, assuring essential instruments, reading and interpretation of these pieces among students from the schools involved in the program.
source: https://www.etic.pt/en/etics-student-film-enters-plano-nacional-de-cinema/The “cold and raw” portrait of Fajão, a Burnt Land that won the Sophia Student Award.
It was December 2017 and “the smell could still be felt” of the fires that had devastated Fajão three months earlier. As the car approached the village, Francisco Romão did not find the places he always saw "green and beautiful". On the contrary: “There was nothing green, everything was burnt,” he says. Camera in hand, he arrived at his grandmother's land to make a portrait in the form of a documentary and show “one of the many villages that had burned” in Portugal.
source: https://www.publico.pt/2019/03/30/p3/noticia/o-retrato-frio-e-cru-de-fajao-uma-terra-ardida-que-venceu-o-premio-sophia-estudante-1867262Other news
