To the Left of the Fir Tree + The Seasons

Event has passed

A film that returns Willi, in his ninth decade and recently moved to a care home, to his garden and its routines in the northernmost part of Germany. Through memory he describes a path through his fruit trees – cherry, apple and plum – to where once stood a fir, as images shot some time ago of his bright home and the fur of a cat sew past and present together.

Three images succeeding the other in the beginning of The Seasons anticipate its polyphonic approach to portraiture: a yellow van on winding roads buoyant to a song by Lucho Gavilanes, dry earth tilled by a hand-operated farming tool, and an excavation. Taking place almost entirely out of doors, Fazendeiro’s film braids a social, sylvan, folkloric and revolutionary history of the Alentejo region in the south of Portugal, one observed through small acts in its small towns, and the fieldnotes of German archaeologists Georg and Vera Leisner, who first catalogued ancient tombs in the landscape prior to WWII. The elements in her scenario (trips of goats, pale green lichen, changing weather) are viewed with alacrity, as she traces the accounts of collective farming projects and local song.

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.