GOD-AND-A-HALF

DEUS-E-MEIO

Portugal| 2024 | 25min | col.

Two characters are wandering between empty corridors and peeling walls in an abandoned hospital; surrounded by the rubble, sitting as they did many years ago by the two sides of a writing desk, the filmmaker, Margarida Assis, and Manuel João Brito, the oncologist who cured her when she was a child, meet again. The result is a dialogue on the doctor-patient relationship, a relationship that for many aspects is as decisive as it is limited to precise time and space while it is marked by distance as well as intimacy. Meeting again as both adults triggers a temporal game of mirrors in which the gaze of the present dwells and interrogates traces of the past; it makes memories, questions, and ghosts present. Assis’s film is a way to wonder about memory, film’s capacity of creating contact between distant times, and, in this short-circuit, reinventing them. According to the film director, in an offscreen comment: “Cinema has scientifically proven that there's no difference between memory and the future.” (m.m.)