Monday, November 10, 2025 at 8:00 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
The feature debut of Portuguese filmmaker Marta Mateus is a forceful collision of documentary reality and myth. In the Alentejo region of southern Portugal, where Mateus is from, a peasant community of grape-pickers become agents in an open-air ritual of remembrance and rebellion. It’s harvest time and there’s discontent in the fields. Suddenly, a black bull is on the loose, and the laborers must scramble for refuge high up in the oak trees. As the specter of the beast looms below, they share bread and wine, memories and dreams, the history of the landscape and of struggles past and present. Night begins to fall, and time swells. The wind that brings the heatwave, it burns. A fable-like film rich with language and monumental gesture, Fire of Wind announces a rare voice in contemporary cinema, an artist of deep political commitment steeped in the great filmmaking traditions of Portugal, all the while forging a singular new path forward. Preceded by: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (Dir. João César Monteiro, 1969, 19 min) Los Angeles premiere of new 4K restoration! In Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, his inaugural work, Monteiro films the renowned Portuguese poet at work, with her family, at sea, and at home, creating a tender, delicate portrait that, in his own words, “represents above all the proof to those who want to understand and accept it, that poetry can’t be filmed…and this uncompromising shame makes it, I believe, poetic, in spite of it.” TRT: 93 min In person: Marta Mateus