Trails (1978)★ 7.1/10
- Drama
- Fantasy
Directed by: João César Monteiro
Written by: Aeschylus, José Gomes Ferreira, João César Monteiro, Maria Velho da Costa, Carlos de Oliveira
For his feature debut Monteiro creatively borrowed from traditional Portuguese legends to craft a series of echoing, parallel tales of young couples desperately escaping cruel false fathers, each couple on the run across different regions of the country and during increasingly contemporary time periods. A lyrical and profoundly cinematographic allegory with a glistening sharp political edge, Paths traces a pattern of repressive authority across Portuguese history while also pointing, with cautious optimism, towards the steady presence of youthful resistance. With its stunning choreography of landscape and use of a poetic, associative structure to evoke the longue durée of mythical time, Paths anticipates Monteiro's mid-career masterpiece Silvestre.
