“This is an example of the beautiful aspiration of As Estações: to have us feel the vibrant, perennial, diverse flow of life running through what we too often belittle as ‘the landscape’.”

Until this year Maureen Fazendeiro was best known for her work as a collaborator of Miguel Gomes, having co-directed The Tsugua Diaries with him in 2021 and co-written Grand Tour in 2024. As Estações (The Seasons) is her first feature film, which premieres in Locarno a few months after she presented Les Habitants, a medium-length movie, at Cinéma du Réel. As implied by their respective titles, these two documentaries cover the dual roots of Fazendeiro: Les Habitants takes place in France, in the Parisian suburb she originates from, while As Estações is set in Portugal, where she grew up and still lives. More specifically, the latter film brings us to Alentejo, a rural region southeast of Lisbon.

As Fazendeiro films it, nothing much happens in the fields, the farms and the forests of Alentejo’s countryside on a day-to-day basis – only the daily life of the animals (goats, rabbits and such), who humans keep bothering, whether it is children for mere fun or adults for livestock farming purposes. What really interests the director is the past of the place, its numerous layers of stories that form history in the greatest sense of the word. The seasons of the title constitute decades, or even centuries for humans. They are to be taken from the point of view of the trees (like the majestic, ancient cork oak that Fazendeiro uses as the subject of a gorgeous final panning shot), or the dolmens, that are one of the cornerstones of the film.

Alentejo dolmens have mainly been studied by two German archeologists, Georg and Vera Leisner, whose written correspondence with their kin back in their homeland is read in voice-over. It is a way to bring back to life their work, which itself consisted of breathing life into what look like inanimate stones. This is an example of the beautiful aspiration of As Estações: to have us feel the vibrant, perennial, diverse flow of life running through what we too often belittle as ‘the landscape’. In the reversal of perspective offered by Fazendeiro humans are still present, but as mere intermediary figures, helping to pass on to others the important remembrances of what we mistakenly think is inert or extinct.

Such is the function of archeologists that are shown pursuing the work of the Leisners on the dolmens today; the same goes for tour guides explaining the prehistoric cave paintings of the area, and for villagers keeping the memory of political struggles of a past both near and distant alive through songs and stories. For instance, how the Carnation Revolution in the region started with workers’ strikes against the local landlords, and how this event that changed the course of Portugal from military dictatorship to democracy could have turned into an even bigger societal transformation. A commune of peasants took over the farms and started redistributing the means of production and subsistence, before they were told to back down and let the socio-economic status quo live on.

Cinema is the last, but not the least, of the means that Fazendeiro depicts as able to make memories and tales resurface. The former are kept alive by archive footage, which play a similar part to written and spoken words. But when it comes to the latter, cinema can do unique wonders by seamlessly weaving together reality and myth through editing. Such a thing happens in two beautiful sequences of As Estações, in which the documentary gives way, unexpectedly and effortlessly, to the representations of local legend (one about an “enchanted Moor”, the other about a tortured insurgent) as if they were true, while at the same time respecting the oral account of the story. Fazendeiro’s visual essay blends everything, past and present, flora and fauna, the surface and the underground, the violence and the beauty, in a smooth and simple manner that makes it all the more insightful and something to cherish.