My Grandfather's Demons
Directed by Nuno Beato
Hosted by Nuno Beato, director.
Official selection
Annecy Film Festival 2022
La Rochelle Film Festival 2022
Director
Nuno Beato
Writer
Possidónio Cachapa, Cristina Pinheiro
Composer
Carlos Guerreiro, Manuel Riveiro
contact
Sardinha em Lata
Rosa is almost at the end of her rope, frustrated with her design-agency job and her stressful urban lifestyle. She’s also troubled by guilt over her lack of communication with her grandfather, who raised her out in the countryside after her mother’s death. Now he has passed on as well, and bequeathed his rural property to her. It’s a bittersweet, mixed blessing for her, but she’s compelled to step back from work and head out to the village in northern Portugal where she grew up. It’s not entirely as she remembers it. The locals are not particularly welcoming, and her grandfather’s modest farm has since expanded into a sprawling, poorly kept fortress of sorts, a resentful hermit’s way of keeping the world at bay. It’s littered with his demonic little ceramic figurines, which are more than mere household decorations, and clues pointing to troubling secrets buried in the past.
Rich in the culture and ancient, Celtic-flavoured folklore of northern Portugal, the country’s first-ever stop-motion animated feature is an engrossing drama about the push and pull of family ties, how roots can both nourish and entangle, told with inspired technical flourishes and a luminous sense of the magical. Co-written by noted novelist Possidónio Cachapa and graced with a score by the intrepid Portuguese folk musicians Gaiteiros de Lisboa, MY GRANDFATHER’S DEMONS marks the feature-length debut for award-winning animator Nuno Beato, who invests the fascinating tale with a vivid sense of place, a raw, earthy sensibility to match its intimations of the unearthly. – Rupert Bottenberg
Showings
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