An evocation of nordeast region of Portugal, Trás-os-Montes, whose historic and cultural roots are completely mixed with the spanish neighbors, separated only by the waters of the Douro river. Ths kids and the mothers, the women and the old people, the houses, the land, the rocks and the trees. The daily life and the myths, the soon to be gone old activities, the subsistance agricultural activities. The man and the animal. The passing of the time. The isolation and the distance. The espiritual presence of the begone, in search of other lands to survive, other horizons to reach. A visual and colorful poem on the land, interpreted by their inhabitants... 1974 was the year of the democratic Revolution in Portugal. A few days after the liberation, António Reis and Margarida Martins Cordeiro saw his medium-lenght movie, Jaime, about the paintings of a man who spent the last thirty years of his life in an psychiatric institution, to be exhibited teatrically. In the following year and a half, everyone was doing or discussing politics. Not the filmmakers couple. Armed with their 16mm camera and sound device, and a very short crew, the director and his wife spent in that northern region seventy days, divided in three periods, during which they walked around ten thousands kilometers. Then, a ten months period of editing. In April 1976, the movie in his final version was shown for the first time, to the ones who contributed most to their making, the people from the region. Then, the theatrically release in arthouses. And the full discovering of a sensible, unique and talented new directors, by the international community, giving to this masterpiece some important prizes in film festivals like Toulon, Manheim or Lecce. But Trás-os-Montes is far more than a documentary, or an anthropologyc essay. Is a visual poem, a travel to the pure essence of cinema, a view without masks of real people and their world, physical and spiritually rooted in the land, living in communion, without any other borders except the struggle to survive. (João Antunes)

* Excerpt from the 2011 Jeonju International Film Festival Program book