Fogo do Vento (Fire of Wind) | 2024 Locarno Film Festival Review

The Wind Carries On: Mateus Crafts Political Fable Fusing Past & Present

In her debut film, Fogo do Vento (Fire of Wind), which finds a harvesting community lost in the past as they face an uncertain future, Portuguese director Marta Mateus descends into an abstract fable where shared memories, prayers, and pleas coalesce. Produced by Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa, whose influence on Mateus’ presentation feels apparent, it’s an arthouse fable about the metaphorical plights of the working class, where even the beasts of burden have revolted, pinning them between a rock and a hard place. A long night spent in the trees ends with a morning bringing with it struggles of the past, marrying a past with the unstable present.

It perhaps doesn’t help that we don’t get to differentiate between the harvesters stuck in the trees, some of them returning from Mateus’ 2017 short Barbs, Wastelands, which takes place at the end of 19th century and explores the Carnation Revolution in a bid for better work conditions. Such conditions have changed slightly for this community in the Alentejo landscape, assisted and potentially phased out by machines which harvest faster than they can. We learn only the name of one worker, a young woman named Soraia (Soraia Prudêncio), who cuts herself, her blood leaking into the soil. As a loose bull gores one of the men at the end of their work day, sending the rest of them up into the trees, she’s blamed by some as the cause of this onslaught. As evening turns to night, memories flood over them, some shared aloud, while others pray.

With the break of morning, a young soldier arrives, asking Soraia for a cigarette. She inquires if he’s there to slay the bull, but instead his radio transmissions confirm he’s from the past, part of a group of wandering comrades standing in opposition to dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

Initially, Fire of Wind seems to be hinting at the mythological, a rampaging bull appearing beneath the humans dangling above in the trees. Like Zeus taking the form of a bull to abduct Europa for his sexual pleasure, Soraia promises to be a sacrificial scapegoat the others seem more than willing to abandon. Also serving as DP alongside Vitor Carvalho, Mateus’ most visually striking moments are of these humans in the trees. With the daylight fading, the film itself turns into a gloomy, lethargic exercise which only feels increasingly conceptual in its last fifteen minutes.

While Fire of Wind logically earns some comparisons to Costa’s own body of work, Mateus eschews the central focus often uniting his slow-burn aesthetics. The loosely formatted sentiments punctuating the film’s silence also feel reminiscent of early Pasolini, where the impoverished are unduly punished by the crushing wheels of capitalism, like a less sensational (or underwhelming) version of Pigsty (1969) in its unification of past and present examples of dispossession. In a way, it’s most reminiscent, energetically, of Denis Cote’s COVID-19 production Social Hygiene (2021).

While her debut took six years to come together, it would seem the script received less attention than it should have. Ultimately a tad tiresome even with a slim running time of seventy-four minutes, Fire of Wind suggests Mateus has the eye of a formidable filmmaker, but the narrative feels like more of a concept than statement.

Reviewed on August 13th at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival (77th edition) — Concorso Internazionale section. 74 Mins.

★★½/☆☆☆☆☆