ON PLAINS OF LARGER RIVER & WOODLANDS

Tasmania is, for me, a progressively harmful place in various ways, and this isn’t something that affects only an immigrant like me. Of course, for someone who comes from abroad, the factors are somewhat different. But in a place devoid of culture, education, and human and emotional relationships, anyone is vulnerable to a fleeting, generic, superficial, and repetitive life, with a cloud of condemnation hanging over the youth. In this place, I often think and dream about my past – my childhood, the teenage years… and when I try to draw parallels between myself and these people and the world around them, I find it almost impossible. They are two realities, two different universes. The physical distance between one place and the other, literally on opposite ends of the planet, is as vast as the differences between their people. Cinema intertwines with my own life, which I view in a very fatalistic way. When I arrived, I had the desire to make a trilogy of feature films about Tasmania – first, about the people here who are lost and soulless, without a deep-rooted purpose; second, about the animal gaze as a witness to time and space; and third, about a cosmic and supernatural side that transcends everything and everyone. That would have been my banner, my path to eventually return home. However, no matter how long I stay here, Australia does not feel like part of me. It started to make sense to converge and condense these three points into one, in a freer, shorter form, both in the process and the final product. I’ve never been drawn to patriotism, attachment, or nostalgia, and I now find myself returning to times that no longer belong to me, to places that no longer exist, and above all, to the idea that Australia has made me Portuguese.