Cinematography Project
Place: Sintra and Fonte da Telha.
Date: 2021 to present.
Brume, perhaps my most interesting project because it was born out of the pure curiosity of someone who has no training in the area but nevertheless decided one day to try filming in the same way as he photographs and later shooting in the same way he filmed. The result is interesting because it modifies the way in which photography is made and the resulting footage, devoid of any type of noteworthy argument, takes on unique aesthetic qualities that could only come from a photographic eye.
Brume is thus a cinematographic project with photographic roots, with weak arguments and only concerned with aesthetic issues and photographic composition.
For any film, a setting and above all, movement is needed. In the first three chapters of Brume the journey takes us to the woodlands of Fonte da Telha and Sintra in Portugal. From the rare maritime brume in Fonte da Telha to the storms and cloud cover in the Sintra mountains, the photographic journey is rich in images of these mystical conditions that transform an otherwise mundane woodland in a film set.
Summer storms, coastal mists and mornings in dense fog are the ingredients for the first three chapters of Brume, a project born from an old passion, cinema.
BRUME TRILOGY
The set for this film is the woodlands of Fonte da Tenha, Mata Nacional dos Medos, home to a large colony of crows and foxes that coexist very close to the big city of Almada. While another cold front passed through the Portuguese coast a thick bank of fog formed on the surface of the atlantic ocean and by the end of the day the wind picked up forcing the maritime fog over the the clifs of Fonte da telha and into the crows woods.
The weather forecast was 100% chance of fog, no wind and low atmospheric pressure for most of the Portuguese coast. The fog that morning at Sintra was so dense that all sounds seemed muted, an eerie silence only broken by the drops of water falling from the trees, I felt alone in the planet, I saw no one, heard no one and as the hours passed only a few shy singing birds started to break the "Silent Morning".
A summer storm carrying strong winds, rain and low cloud coming from the northwest atlantic arrived at the portuguese coast by the end of the day. With not much daylight left, the Portuguese landscape photographer Tiago Mateus documented its arrival in the woodlands of Sintra in what was later described as a "Blue Dream".
First published Zine from this project
