Learning for those who want to Love

I met Margarida Cordeiro at the time she was preparing the film Rosa de Areia, the third and last one she co-directed with António Reis, of whom I was a student at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema since 1986. I watched the shooting of some scenes in the National Museum of Natural History and the Botanical Garden, Lisbon. Back then, there were few women directors, in Europe, in the world and in Portugal. Seeing a woman directing and guiding a predominantly male team was something very rare that caught the attention, stayed in the memory and raised questions and comments, not forgotten. A few years later, we found ourselves in the vicinity of Príncipe Real, in conversations and urban walks punctuated by her travels between Lisbon and Cacilhas, where she had a painting studio. I remember that she offered me an ointment that still exhales a strong smell of melon when I open the lid of the small bottle. In 1998, when I programmed the Portuguese Film Day, part of the 6th Trencianske Teplice-Trencín Art Film Festival, in Slovakia, we left for that small thermal town, from where Margarida returned to Portugal earlier to participate in the first referendum for the legalization of abortion. Shortly after, Margarida headed to the northeast of Trás-os-Montes, where I visited her in 2000 for the collection and compilation of the oral record Portuguese Filmmakers 1874-1956, talks with…[1] There, I had the privilege of walking with her through places, climbing rocks to scrutinize the northeastern landscape or contemplating the green banks of the Alto Douro. Margarida collected dogs abandoned or mistreated by local populations – a wretched scourge that reproduces like the metastases of a carcinoma, all over the country – and took care of them with attention and affection, dedicating a good part of her daily time to them. We haven’t seen each other since, but her work has remained present in my life, which has gradually derived more and more to Nature and human/more than human inter-relationships, in a common convergence of affections for the living and the non-living.

There is an idea of hers that has accompanied me in my artistic-scientific ecocritical research, which says the following: “For us, in film, Nature works as an exterior house. There is a house, with its spaces and its sounds, but the outside sounds give us the idea of a house that is closed in on itself and open on Nature, on the outside it is also a house, it is also inhabited”[2], affirming this contamination of scales, beings and constituent domains of the universe in which the human subject is inscribed.