The first solo feature of French director and screenwriter Maureen Fazendeiro is a sparse but entrancing affair: part documentary, part travelogue, part folktale, part anthropological study, part fictional reenactment and part visual poem encompassing both the past and present of the Portuguese region of Alentejo. Dotted with monolithic dolmens that excited the curiosities of archaeologists such as Georg and Vera Leisner (whose diaries are excerpted in voiceover fashion) and which turned the region into a site of touristic excitement in the early twentieth century, Alentejo, as Fazendeiro observes, is now mainly a rural farming community and Portugal’s least densely populated locale. Nevertheless, there is still magic to be found amongst the numerous herds of goats and cork oak trees (the bark of which is still harvested by hand) that Fazendeiro sees fit to transmit to willing viewers, with the help of some of her own temporal and stylistic transmutations.
This is a tricky film to review properly, as it begs for an experiential framework first and foremost: of listening to the stories, poems and folksongs of the region’s elders; of taking in the gentle tranquility in which those tending the land work and live; of letting the small rituals shared by both humans and animals alike be processed through the exacting work that the Leisners and others like them did amongst the fascinating dolmens, which loom symbolically in the geographic and filmic space as testaments of both life and death combined. Fazendeiro interweaves her gaze through Alentejo’s history like a living tapestry in motion, observational but intentional, depicting in it a serenity of existence that teems with both mythological and scientific potency.
It’s a relatively short film that necessitates a patient mindset as it drifts between scenes and voices (the two most often joined contrapuntally), and I’m sure even Fazendeiro herself would not claim her film to be an exhaustive or complete depiction of Alentejo’s existence. It is but a small sampling of a place within the ebbs and flows of time, but fashioned in a way that honours its cultural durability even when the seasons shift and change, people come and go, and new songs and stories supplant the old. In this, Fazendeiro does her subject full justice.
The Seasons had its North American premiere at TIFF in the Wavelengths programme on September 11, 2025.
The Lonely Film Critic 