Mónica Baptista

Água Forte

Mónica Baptista

Adriana Villa

A sensory, immersive composition takes us on a journey to a place that seems to have stopped in time but remains timeless. A female voice reads a mythological text on the origin of the world and sets the tone for a documentary-meditation on the presence of primeval elements – like water and flora – and their cohabitation with the natives, whose portraits intersperse the film. The stealthy camera follows a boat drifting across the calm waters of a river, as if the latter were the rings of a tree disclosing its history, in a movement that lulls us and drives us to the physical and metaphysical core. Finally, accompanied by an ancestral chant, the etching gives way to a sequence of images (which in turn emerge like a river reducing the field of action to the essential) and moves into a poetic terrain, summoning the imagination of each one.

Territories

Mónica Baptista

On the mythic Trans-Siberian train, in the 3rd class wagon, all kinds of stories can be heard. People from different nationalities as well as locals, workers, soldiers, students, ...they all share the same time and the same space, ...and along the journey, they even share their own lives... The theme of this movie is one of those stories, amongst many others. Two men travel on the same train, a Russian soldier and a Chechen man with his family returning from the motherland... Without them knowing a genuine link connects them, Chechnya. A war for independence, for a territory that Russia doesn't abdicate turns all Chechens into soldiers at birth.

Diário

Mónica Baptista

This film was made with series of images, over 4000, all them integrate a photographic recording that I have been carrying out for the past three years. Without any initial purpose that would circumscribe all these images, this photo diary drifts and accompanies many different circumstances, trips, places and people.

Teares

Mónica Baptista

The construction of the Castelo de Bode Dam began in 1945. By the new reservoir we now meet three women born in the 1940’s, who still carry out one of the most ancient human crafts – weaving. The mysterious and pathetic character of life, the events of the subconscious and the mutations of the environmental landscape intertwine with the loom’s back and forth.