14/11/2012 - Portuguese director Carlos Saboga makes his debut with Photo, a feature produced by Paulo Branco that is competing in the CinemaXXI section at the Rome Film Festival

Producer Paulo Branco gave Portuguese filmmaker Carlos Saboga the opportunity to direct his first feature when the latter’s hair was already going grey. But he was far from a newcomer to filmmaking, with experience as an assistant director and screenwriter (as one of many examples, he wrote the screenplay for Raúl Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon [+see also:
trailer
film profile]). His first feature, titled Photo [+see also:
trailer
film profile], has screened in the competition in the CinemaXXI section of the seventh edition of the Rome International Film Festival.

Photo, a film made by Portuguese (Saboga, Branco, director of photography Mário Barroso, editor Paulo Mil Homens) in France and mostly shot in France, is the story of Elisa (played by French actress Anna Mouglalis)’s return to the past, from today to the turbulent 1970s, in the footsteps of her recently deceased mother Elsa. When, looking at photos and reliving memories with her mother, she starts to suspect that her father is in fact not Tom (Belgian actor Johan Leysen) after all, Elisa travels to Lisbon to meet the group of revolutionaries -- brutal dreamers with the ambition of changing the world, already old, crazy, or dead -- that accompanied her mother in the period during which she was conceived.

Elisa’s strong resemblance to her mother provokes a strange effect on this group of “comrades”, rejection and attraction in equal parts. With the help of David (Portuguese actor Simao Cayatte), with whom she has a brief fling, she meets the former members of this group of revolutionaries opposed to Salazar one by one. One has recycled himself into a respectable university professor (Uriel, played by French actor Didier Sandrev), another has been admitted into a lunatic asylum (Martim, played by Portuguese actor José Neto), while another still, now a right-wing government minister, tries to avoid her at all costs (Sergio). Yet all wish to escape from a past tarnished by blood in which their idealism produced monsters.

Elisa’s quest is condemned to being fruitless. Collective and historical memory of a complex and violent political past becomes entwined with Elisa’s intimate and personal memory of her mother, as she is startled to discover an episode in the latter’s life that she had not imagined. All this from a Photo.

(Translated from Spanish)