Manuel António Pina: Dois Filmes

“There is an immensity between us and the words. Only an act of love allows us to go towards the words and let them come to us.” These films are such acts, meeting points where we can exchange words with Manuel António Pina. In both features, the house takes in a symbolic dimension, becoming the place of a return to childhood via writing and memory. The short film As Casas não Morrem accompanies Pina during the process of moving from the house where he lived the longest, revealing the affective and material connections between his poetry and the places that embodied it. Um sítio onde pousar a cabeça wanders between the locus solus of the poet’s house and the places where he felt at home (such as the restaurant Convívio, for instance). Besides his words (“I really need solitude”; “The truth, a form of apparition, is more intense at night”; “Poetry is useless”), the film also encompasses the voices of those who engaged with him and read his words. Eduardo Lourenço defines him succinctly: “The poet of an everyday that is simple and metaphysical at once”.