Mists (2003)

Mists (Brumas) is a 2003 Portuguese independent feature-length film by Ricardo Costa, a docufiction. Nonlinear narrative, conceived as an auto-biography, it is a voyage to childhood.

Shot with no state funds (uncommon situation in Portuguese film production), self financed, it is an art film. Formal simplicity – associated with a non conventional, sober and fluid narrative of Time and human condition – is common to most of Ricardo Costa’s films. For him, narrative involves necessarily mise-en-scène and that’s why documentary (real life) tends to turn into fiction. This tendency is fully assumed with Mists, the third Costa’s docufiction, after Changing Tides (1976) and Bread and Wine (1981).

Mists is the first film from a new sequel docufiction autobiographic trilogy, Faraways. Drifts (Derivas), upcoming in 2014, is the second and Cliffs (Arribas) the third one. The filmmaker stars as the protagonist in those films. Mists is set in Peniche, the protagonist's place of birth, Drifts is set in Lisbon, where he lives and works as photographer, and Cliffs again in Peniche, where he returns to face disquieting situations and people.

Mists premiered at the 60th Venice Film Festival (New Territories – 2003), was released in Portugal on 16 November 2006 and opened in New York at the Quad Cinema on March 23, 2011, event followed by other screenings outside the city.

Synopsis

Back to his birthplace (Peniche, a Portuguese fishermen town) more than fifty years after he saw Maria José, who used to be a maid at his parents’ house, when he was a child, the “hero” (the film director) meets her again in the summer of 2011. She is now a mother, grandmother and a great grandmother, with the sea embedded in her soul.