Diários de Otsoga

This collaboration between documentarian Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes is called DIÁRIOS DE OTSOGA in Portuguese. But don’t bother looking up “Otsoga” or “Tsugua” – they spell “August/ Agosto” backwards, which gives a measure of the playfulness of this singular experiment in Covid-era cinema. Shot in lockdown in late summer 2020, the film starts backwards and moves through 22 days, beginning with a scene in which three people – Crista, Carloto, João – have a private party, dancing to the Four Seasons’ “The Night”.
As their story opens out and reverses through time, we realize that the location is a rural hotel, where the trio are busy building a butterfly house. As more characters appear – or, reading things backwards, disappear – the trio emerge as actors in a film being shot by Fazendeiro and Gomes.
Playing similar metafilmic games to Gomes’s 2008 OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST, this film chips insouciantly away at cinema’s fourth wall, hinting at happenstance but constantly showing how much planning is built into (and confounded by) the shooting process. Joyous, playful, yet irreducibly melancholic, this is a commentary on time’s passing, touched by real magic. Lockdown cinema that unlocks a world of possibilities. (Jonathan Romney)

In the presence of Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro.

Miguel Gomes: ENTREANTO (1999, K), 31 (2001, K), KALKITOS (2002, K), A CARA QUE MERECES (2004), CÂNTICO DAS CRIATURAS (2006, K), AQUELE QUERIDO MÊS DE AGOSTO (2008), TABU (2012), ARABIAN NIGHTS: VOLUME 1 – THE RESTLESS ONE (2015), ARABIAN NIGHTS: VOLUME 2 – THE DESOLATE ONE (2015), ARABIAN NIGHTS: VOLUME 3 – THE ENCHANTED ONE (2015), SAVAGERY (2020)
Maureen Fazendeiro: MOTU MAEVA (2014, K), BLACK SUN (2019, K)