Faraways

Faraways (Longes) is a sequel docufiction autobiographic feature film trilogy about Time and human wanderings directed and produced by Portuguese filmmaker Ricardo Costa, who stars the “hero”.
Mists (Brumas), premiered at the 60th Venice Film Festival in 2003, is the first film. It is set in Peniche, the “hero”’s birth place.
Drifts (Derivas), produced in 2009 through 2013, is the second one. It is set in Lisbon, the city where the “hero” lives and works.
Cliffs (Arribas), set once again in Peniche, is a new and last return of the “hero” to his birthplace. Film production will start in autumn 2013.
Production
This trilogy consists of self-financed independent films, «uncommon situation in Portuguese film production» (cit: Mists Wiki article), and of art filmss, which are aimed at a niche market rather than a mass market audience (cit: Wiki article). Shot with no money and unconcerned with production conditionings, such films are shot in full liberty, although submitting to strict aesthetic requirements such as, in this case, marring improvisation with cared cinematography.
History
This trilogy is subsequent to a vast experience of documentary filmmaking in which mise-en-scène is a main concern implicating fictional contamination of pure documentary: being inevitable, mise-en-scène, without betraying the inner ‘truth of cinema’, as cinema vérité, may easily turn into docufiction and so increase its impact as artistic expression. Costa’s filmmaking history leads to a paradox, maybe also to a metaphor. The mismatched encounters of his wanderings across his country, from one extreme to another, filming human realities, far away from home, leads him to a match, encountering old friend Jean Rouch (Paroles). Together with him he goes much further, as far as Africa, our birthplace, at same time taking his way back home, faraway. Since then, as half-witted, he starts playing the “hero” in fictional reality, transmitting unexpected things and odd feelings.
In other words: when filming different people in different places, the filmmaker makes films about other people like himself, about other places like home. Now, back home, being another, much older, he films the horizons his eyes can reach, beyond the ocean. His house is an island (that’s the metaphor). For him, distance and time implicate similar feelings. For him, making films take a long time. For him, films are never finished. Imagery has no end, that’s the story.

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