Time Is a Great Ally

When I started this film I had no ideas. I started helping my grandmother in her daily chores. I became aware of some of the relationships she maintains with nature. The hard work of digging up the soil and preparing it for sowing. The uprooting of weeds. Watering the corn. Staking the beans. My grandmother suffers with the land she tends, with the constant feeling that land must be always looked after. She inherited this land, continuously divided from generation to generation, disputed over by brothers jockeying for the best plot, today too small to be profitable and mostly despised.

There are sensations that only those who live with the land for some time can sense.

At the same time, I would film some things that interested me in the gesture and in the action of the work, to understand the processes of those who persist around here. I also took days off to film in the forest, in parts of my village where rarely anyone goes, occupied by pine trees, by eucalyptus meant for wood production, by a few native trees, and by other creatures that roam free. I also looked for some images that suggested another time, images that I made up, coming from ancestral places told of by my ancestors. In the editing I tried to create a balanced structure and fluidity between images and sounds based on what my experience in nature dictated. Time is a great ally. I let the necessary weeks and months pass by. When I came back, sometimes it worked.

There are sensations that only those who live with the land for some time can sense. Since I started filming, I began to feel something different. Something is changing in the land and it reveals it in its behaviour, in the climate, in the plants, and in ourselves. There are imperceptible movements. Human time is not the only time on earth. How long it takes to just eat an orange.

Raul Domingues
Casal da Quinta, January 2022