A girl spends her holidays in her family’s village in the mountains of Portugal. There, she enjoys summer days with her aunts and her grandmother, with whom she shares a very special bond. Everything goes wrong when the grandmother dies unexpectedly, giving rise to conflicts between the family in this rural town.
Alma Viva is the first feature film by French filmmaker Cristèle Alves Meira. The director returns to her roots to shape this story. Like the protagonist of it, Meira is the daughter of a Portuguese couple who emigrated in the 70s, during the dictatorial regime of Salazar, in search of better living conditions in France.
The film shows from the beginning, with a close-up of the eye of this girl peeking through a door, who will tell this story. The look of Salomé, the youngest of her family, who despite belonging to the younger generation and the only one born outside of town, her beliefs and superstitions shake him strongly.
The title Alma Viva carries with it a strong mystical connotation. A mysticism that will be present throughout the piece. The weight of tradition and popular beliefs takes precedence over what is more “rational and logical”. The double face of popular culture is accentuated: as salvation and in turn as condemnation, producing a coexistence of the solid beliefs of past times with the contemporaneity of the present time.
This strong grandmother-granddaughter bond causes that when the first one dies, Salomé feels everything supernatural that her grandmother has transmitted to her with her practices and stories on her own skin. The discernment of reality and beliefs becomes more and more difficult for the girl, who will go from looking around her in a passive attitude to being the center of all the action.
The director submerges the story in a magical realism, in which the central axis is the rituals of passage. “I believe that we cannot rationalize everything and the fact of believing that death opens to nothingness is a minority vision of the world that is imposed in our western societies with great conviction.†explains the author in an interview in the magazine Tribuna do Cinema.
The film, which opens today in Spanish theaters, has swept the Sophia Awards of the Portuguese Film Academy, in which it has won six of the thirteen categories, including best film and best original screenplay.
“Sooner or later every independent woman is accused of witchcraft” sentences one of the characters. The fantastic of the film does not overshadow a reality of the rural world that the director wants to show. The film makes a great costumbrist portrait of a rural town and its ways of life, without falling into idealization. The people that Meira represents reflects, among other issues, the machismo rooted in the proletariat and the lower classes, in which women are more vulnerable and become the object of cruel value judgments.
