Verandas e hinverneiras still
by Bruno Simões Castanheira
Play

The Land of the Widows of the Living

PlayPausePausePlay Video

In the High North West of Portugal, Castro Laboreiro is situated in a territory of unparalleled natural, historical and cultural value, where the ways of life of its people persist to the present day, vestiges of an agrarian and highland society, in danger of extinction.

Beautiful, wild, unusual, they are above all women who still resist, by will or by fate, the marks and changes of depopulation and climate change, and the transformation of this rural area into a tourist area. 89-year-old Isalina and her daughter Leonor are the only people left to practice the century-old tradition of transhumance, the ‘muda’. When her mother dies, Leonor says she will stop doing it. Maria, Duartina and the sisters Adília and Almerinda haven’t done the ‘muda’ in years and won’t ever again. Surrounded by landscapes dense with mysticism, these women are the last vestiges of a mountain society in the last moments of its intense transformation process, on the verge of extinction.

Looking for financing and co-production.

By  Melanie Pereira
Documentary
Verandas e hinverneiras still

by Bruno Simões Castanheira

Verandas e hinverneiras still

by Bruno Simões Castanheira

The Followers of the Revolution The of the Revolution / Next

Director’s notes

The Land of the Widows of the Living

By  Melanie Pereira

Having developed several film works and projects around Portuguese migrations, closely linked to the condition and situation of women in our societies, it was quite instinctively that I went to meet Castro Laboreiro, and discovered not only the last two women who practice the century-old transhumance tradition, but also a matriarchal society inserted in a context of deep desertification of the interior of the country, of continuous forced migrations, of impending climatic changes, strongly framed by a disproportionate political abandonment. By fully immersing myself in this reality, "Verandas e Hinverneiras" intends to be an observational portrait in images and sounds, which follows the cycle of the imminent last transhumance of the Iberian Peninsula; records the individual and collective memories of those who practiced it; observes the intimate relationship between these women and the nature that surrounds them. A portrait of the remains of a way of life that will be taken over by absences and silences in a few decades time.