ON PLAINS OF LARGER RIVER & WOODLANDS

Australia, Portugal | 2024 | 13 min | col.

Two young women stuck in Sandy Bay, Tasmania, reflect on life and family, desires and dreams. They feel they won’t manage to resist unless they take off steam talking to each other – and taking another hit at the bong. Their words blend in the landscape, in a lysergic, hallucinated whole, while menacing black clouds get closer and the local fauna watches with indifference, becoming one with the women’s confusion. However short, the film traces an arc, delivering the drowsy despair of two marginalized women with a shattering force. Miguel de Jesus moved to Tasmania to reflect on the role of the stranger and displaced, making a quietly exploding, mesmerizing film that lets us into an intimate, non-linear world which would be impossible to access through speech but is permeable to acoustic visions of smoke and chaos. (l.f.)