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BERLINALE 2022 Forum

Review: Striking Land

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- BERLINALE 2022: The film by Portuguese director Raul Domingues plays with space and time, which he expands and dilates to the point of radically subverting its rules

Review: Striking Land

A form of meditation or litany with an antique flavour, Striking Land [+see also:
trailer
interview: Raul Domingues
film profile
]
, which is competing in the Forum section of the 72nd Berlinale, is the second feature film offered up by young Portuguese director Raul Domingues. It’s a radical and complex film which plays with and ultimately overturns viewers’ perceptions. Used to seeing himself as the measure of all things, man loses his privileged status to nature, which takes his place, taking charge of and expanding time as she feels fit, and playing with his expectations to the limits of endurance.

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Free of dialogue and accompanied only by the sounds of nature – the rain, a waterway, animal cries and songs - the sounds of tools - such as shovels and hoes - hitting the earth, and the mismatched noises of agricultural tools interfering with the latter’s advance - Striking Land forces us to look to these sounds and their accompanying images for the film’s raison d’être (and much more).

Based upon Amy J. Elias and Christian Mararu’s book The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, Raul Domingues’ second film questions the privileged place human beings enjoy as bosses and exploiters of nature, who finds herself trapped within the productive frenzy of a globalised world which doesn’t care a jot about her needs. Within the nigh-on hypnotic meditation offered up by Striking Land, people – notably farmers whose strong hands bear the signs of hard work, filmed close-up by the director – are just one part of the wider whole. There’s also nature, trees, water, animals, flowers and much more. We’re but one piece of a far bigger and more complex puzzle in which each and every element is as important as the other.

The dominant position of human beings as central to a space-time continuum which belongs only to them, is called into question here through the restoration of a necessary balance with nature. Although they’re not altogether ousted from the screen (two farmers appear in the film, a man and a woman whose hands have been ruined by work, by the land and by the sun, and who are often shot very up-close, revealing a particular feature, a neck or a shoulder), human beings have to adapt to the rhythm of the nature surrounding them, anchoring themselves firmly in this land which sustains them (the female farmer we see most in the film often works barefoot as if wanting to “feel” the earth). “They’re sensations which only those who have lived in contact with the land for some time can feel”, confesses the director, who uses his film to convey the deep bond which can develop between man and nature when respect is placed centre stage in the production process.

In its observation of almost imperceptible movements – a ladybird on a leaf, drops of water on a rose, a robin landing on a branch and flies hammering up against a horse’s bad eye, which the director magnifies as if wanting to capture them - the film’s approach to time feels perfectly fitting.

The undisputed protagonist of the film, Portugal’s hinterland ultimately sets out its own rules, forcing us to free ourselves from the frenzy of daily life and from our own arrogant expectations and needs. Rather than looking to portray the Portuguese countryside as some sort of idyll or new, modern-day Eden, the director tries to reconnect us with an ancestral pace which was once our own, and to lull us into a hypnotic state through meticulous and uncompromising observation.

Striking Land is produced by Oublaum Filmes and Etnograf Films. Terratreme Filmes are handling international sales.

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(Translated from Italian)

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