48, Susana de Sousa Dias, Portugal, 2009, 93´. PT sub. ES

Season: Arming the camera 

"Those are the clothes with which they cleaned the floor of the cell where she was being tortured."

In the year 2000, Susana de Sousa Dias made her first foray into the photographic archive of the PIDE/DGS, the Portuguese political police. This archive, terrible in its composition, infinite in the representation of the suffering of the people who made it up, was the starting point for some works that Susana would develop later. Movie 48 is one of them.

When this film was shown for the first time in Portugal, everyone fell silent. No one wanted to face the events of the past. No one wanted to assume that perhaps the father of the next-door neighbor could have provoked those terrible tortures. Nor did anyone know how to look at a person who had been the victim of police torture. The film had to make a successful international tour to later have a recognizable place in Portuguese cinematography.

Beyond the fact that 48 is an essential film to restore the condition of people tortured during the Portuguese dictatorial regime, it is above all a monumental cinematographic exercise. The co-temporality of the images allows that in each sequence we can approach several temporal spaces at the same time: the past printed in the archive images and a present that becomes manifest through the voices of the protagonists who meet again with these images.

Every gesture is important in this film. Nothing is left over and everything becomes part of the same substance, the cinematographic image.

The film has been chosen by Arantza Santesteban, within the Carte Blanche cycle. Arantza Santesteban will present the film.