Mists (Brumas), 2003, is a Portuguese feature-length film by Ricardo Costa.
It is an auto-biography, a voyage to childhood. Shot with no state funds (uncommon situation in Portuguese film production) it is an art film. Formal simplicity – associated with a non conventional, sober and fluid narrative[1] of time and human condition – is common to most of Ricardo Costa’s films. For him, narrative involves necessarily mise-en-scène and that’s why documentary (real life) tends to turn into fiction. This tendency is fully assumed with Mists, the third Costa’s docufiction, after Changing Tides (1976) and Bread and Wine (1981). Mists is the first film of a new trilogy.
It is premiered at the 60th Venice Film Festival (New Territories – 2003) and released in Portugal on 16 November 2006.
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More than fifty years later, the hero meets Maria José again. She used to be a maid at his parents’ house, when he was a child. From her he has heard the most implausible stories. She was then eighteen and he was about six. The young woman became an elderly lady: a wrinkled mother, then a grandmother and a great grandmother, with the sea embedded in her soul. She lives in a fishermen’s village with white and diminutive houses perched at the edge of a cliff in Peniche, an ancient fishermen's town, at a neighbourhood known as "Windows of the Sea".
She now tells the story of her life. She repeats life-giving gestures, illuminating childhood dreams. The camera follows those steps, moves backwards, and then it lurches forward, suggesting a disquieting outcome of situations of these days, like those of the 11th September of that same year. The boys who live around her tell the same story in a different way. To make that possible, all it takes is a flick-knife, a handsaw, a broom stick, bamboo canes, floaters from the sardine nets, a few magic tricks.
Towers crash. The unpredictable Atlantic swaying under the splendour of the mists. Time (CIT. producer’s synopsis [2]).
REVIEWS
MISTS