Volta à Terra ((Be)Longing): a documentary about vanishing rural Portugal

What Ecorustics is trying to do is show rural Portugal to the rest of the world. We think it matters that millennials and the generations after them understand how our grandparents actually lived, and how that turned into the way we live now. The best way to understand a rural past is to spend time in it. That is true anywhere; we focus on Portugal because it is the context we know best.

Spending a few days in a traditional Portuguese village will tell you more than any amount of reading. It is a museum with no walls, and the exhibits are whole generations. The catch is that you should not wait too long. Rural Portugal is emptying out, and in many places all that is left of an active past are the traces of it.

A documentary that gets it right

Back in 2014, João Pedro Plácido made a documentary called Volta à Terra, released in English as (Be)Longing. In it he filmed the dying traditions of an isolated hamlet in the northern mountains of Portugal, Uz. Over 78 minutes it does much the same thing we are trying to do: open a window onto the rural world.

The still above, from the film, shows the mountain landscape of northern Portugal, almost certainly shot in winter. Those stone walls represent an enormous amount of manual work. The granite is there to hold the soil as flat as possible, which makes irrigation possible and keeps the nutrients from washing away.

Volta à Terra follows three generations of subsistence farmers through four seasons, in a village that emigration has very nearly emptied. There is more on IMDb, and if you want to go further into Portuguese cinema, start here.

I am not going to review the cinematography, because that is not my field. What I can say is that there is not a single scene in it that rings false. Every situation and every conversation could have happened exactly that way with the camera switched off. And that is the point: this way of living is disappearing quickly, so visit the remote villages of northern Portugal while the museum is still open.

There is one hopeful footnote. Some of the people who left Portugal looking for a better living are now coming back to work the land again, as below.

Let us know what you think in the comments, and please share this if it resonates.