Leonor Areal‘s film-essay Where is Pessoa? was awarded an honourable mention in the Outros Olhares section of the 29th edition of the Caminhos do Cinema Português festival, “for transforming an over 100-year-old current affairs film into a modern crime thriller”.

As we’ve already reported, over the course of about an hour, the IHC researcher takes us through her analysis of a silent film from 1913, digitised by Portuguese Cinematheque, in which people are seen leaving a concert at the former Teatro República (now the Teatro Municipal São Luiz). Amongst the crowd, Leonor Areal says she can spot the poet Fernando Pessoa.

“As if by magic, the film born at the beginning of the last century passes through the wormhole and lands in the editing room today, where the director’s attentive eye scrutinises, as in a detective film, everything that the images have to tell us,” said the jury of the Outros Olhares section of the Caminhos do Cinema Português festival. Film critic Jorge Mourinha, in an article published in Público, said that “it’s a delight to follow the way Areal takes them apart, identifying both the day on which everything takes place and the characters that appear (with many surprises along the way)”.

Where is Pessoa? can be seen tomorrow, 23 November, at 5.15pm, at the Porto Post Doc festival, in Porto. Below, we share the interview Leonor Areal gave to Antena1’s Uma Noite em Forma de Assim, where she talks about the process of creating this film-essay and the challenges it poses to the public [in Portuguese].