Maureen Fazendeiro excavates landscape as living archive, fusing archaeology, oral history, and local myth into a layered docu-fictional portrait of southern Portugal's cultural memory.
Filmmaker Maureen Fazendeiro composes a stratified cinematic topography where archaeology, oral tradition, and rural labor intersect in her latest hybrid work, The Seasons.
The film unfolds across Alentejo, a region in southern Portugal marked by megalithic monuments, agrarian reforms, and stories passed down in whispered legends and sung poems. Drawing on the personal archives of German archaeologists Georg and Vera Leisner, found footage from the post-revolutionary 1970s, and material developed in workshops with local children and poets, Fazendeiro constructs a non-linear excavation of land, voice, and memory. The film attempts to treat territory not only as a geopolitical entity, but as a palimpsest of lived and imagined experiences.
Fazendeiro's formal methods have long signaled an interest in crossing disciplinary and narrative thresholds. Her earlier works, such as Motu Maeva and Sol Negro, demonstrate an ongoing interrogation of how images, archival, observational, or performative, can be interwoven with voice, text, and song.
The Tsugua Diaries (co-directed with Miguel Gomes) extended this approach by integrating process into the narrative structure, foregrounding temporality as a visible construct. In The Seasons, Fazendeiro continues and deepens this line of inquiry, layering documentary, dramatization, and ethnographic observation in a structure that resists chronology in favor of associative assembly. The resulting form evokes the logic of archaeological excavation itself, a site of overlapping traces, each unearthed through methods that are simultaneously systematic and intuitive.
What distinguishes The Seasons is its compositional rigour under what may appear to be a spontaneous, hybrid form. While grounded in real-world research, notably, the wartime exile and fieldwork of the Leisners, the film is neither biographical nor expository.
Fazendeiro repurposes their archives as one stratum among many: their measurements and field notes coexist with local legends of enchanted Moors, staged scenes of shepherds encountering phantoms, and cooperative songs from the post-dictatorship agricultural reforms. These fragments are not arranged in a didactic structure. Instead, they form a cyclical composition, initially divided into seasonal chapters, but ultimately collapsing into a spiral of interconnected motifs. The shift away from linear progression toward recurrence and juxtaposition mirrors Fazendeiro's stated interest in literature, particularly the associative logic found in the work of W.G. Sebald.
The film employs a minimalistic aesthetic that prioritizes duration over action. Static landscape shots, composed with the precision of observational cinema, often serve as temporal anchors rather than scenic backdrops.
These images, captured on 16mm, emphasize materiality: not only of the film stock itself, but of the trees, stones, and terrain it records. Fazendeiro has noted that she approached the landscape sequences with more preparation than the staged segments, which often involved improvisation with local non-actors. This methodological reversal underscores a central concern of the film: how to grant physical space the same agency as narrative characters.
Sound functions as a second register of narration. Voiceovers, ranging from poetic recitations to firsthand memories, alternate with ambient recordings and music, including local songs and reinterpreted historical pieces.
The layering of soundscapes mirrors the visual sedimentation, reinforcing the film's conceptual core: that memory and history are constructed through overlapping testimonies, some spoken, some sung, and some embedded in place. The inclusion of poetry and oral storytelling not only adds narrative texture but offers a subtle critique of how knowledge is historically archived, privileging the written and measured over the sung and remembered.
Of particular interest is the integration of found footage, notably the reels shot in 1975-76 by a local cinephile during the height of Portugal's agrarian reform. Unearthed and developed decades later, the footage bridges amateur authorship and political documentation.
Fazendeiro incorporates these images without overt commentary, allowing the material itself, and the visible deterioration on the film stock, to suggest the passage of time and the fragility of memory. This archaeological metaphor extends to other aspects of the film, including the animated sequences based on Vera Leisner's meticulous drawings of engraved schist plaques. These interludes foreground the translation of physical artifacts into visual codes, and by extension, into cinematic language.
The Seasons advances Fazendeiro's long-standing interest in how communities inscribe meaning onto landscape. While The Tsugua Diaries played with temporal dislocation within a confined setting, The Seasons expands that inquiry across a wider geographical and historical canvas. The Seasons recalls the speculative ethnographies of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, notably Mysterious Object at Noon, which also blurs the line between documentary evidence and communal invention.
In contrast to more polemical historical documentaries, Fazendeiro avoids direct political exposition. The landowners and rural workers, both of whom she interviewed, do not appear in debate, nor are their opposing views synthesized. Instead, political content is refracted through cultural forms: a children's legend, a poem to Charro, a harvest song sung in a communal courtyard.
This indirect approach positions politics not as ideology but as embedded cultural residue, transmitted and transformed over time. Fazendeiro continues to chart a cinematic territory between disciplines and traditions with docu-fiction hybrid.