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SMOKE OF THE FIRE
O FUMO DO FOGO
Portugal, Ukraine, Belgium, Hungary | 2023 | 22 min
How to find the words to describe war, remoteness, or fear in a language other than yours? Through classes of Portuguese and pages of an old abecedary, the film director is trying to translate the complex and painful feelings derived from uprooting and exile. The effort put in learning the sounds and expressions of the new language mirrors the attempt to find fragments of her native town, Kyiv, in the photographs and sounds sent from home. Sound and image continuously shift between the here and elsewhere, between Portugal and warring Ukraine, between adoptive Portuguese and native Ukrainian. In the space in-between, language (of words and of cinema) causes little short-circuits that try to get a hold of a world now elusive and hostile. Daryna Mamaisur constructs a subtle and personal film-essay in search of the ineffable bond between words and things, exploring the tangle of what can be named, and therefore told. (m.m.)
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