Fire of Wind: Marta Mateus on her moonlit vigil in Portuguese wine country

In Marta Mateus’s startlingly beautiful feature debut Fire of Wind, workers on a vineyard in Portugal’s Alentejo region are forced to take to the trees after a bull gets loose in the fields. Up in the branches, they spend a night as a temporary community, their thoughts haunted by the ghosts of the past and the long shadow of the authoritarian regime of António de Oliveira Salazar, who governed Portugal from 1932 to 1968.

The bright sunshine of the opening vine-picking sequences gives way to some of the most remarkable nighttime images in recent memory, with faces now illuminated by shafts of moonlight as the workers keep their marooned vigil. Time slips as past and present, reverie and reality seem to merge in the night.

Produced by Pedro Costa, Mateus’s husband, and co-edited by Claire Atherton, Chantal Akerman’s longtime editor, Fire of Wind feels wrought out of a profound connection with the landscape and buried history of the wine country where Mateus grew up. She joined us via video call from Paris to delve into it.

I understand that Fire of Wind all started with an image you had of a black bull. 

Marta Mateus: This situation of going into the trees when a bull appears is actually something that happened to some people in Alentejo. I had some friends that had to pass some time on a tree, and it actually happened to Maria Caterina, the actress, the older lady that is telling the story in the film. One time she was working in the fields and some bulls ran away, so they had to go up to the trees and wait for someone to come and take them out.

I thought this would be an interesting moment or happening; that it would make this encounter possible between many people who are in the same situation, going into the night, and where we could start to mingle reality and dreams. In Alentejo, the oral tradition is very strong. It’s a place of poets more than anything – oral poetry because not so many people knew how to read and write before the revolution. I think the tales, legends and this richness of the language is connected to a very strong idea of organising life. Fiction is a way of organising life in a much more concrete way in order to think ‘what are we doing here?’, and to transmit certain important values.

The middle third of the film is all up in the trees. What was it like shooting for so long up there?

Difficult. It sounded like a very easy idea. In a way it was. Some of the crew that came from Lisbon were very impressed when Maria Caterina was going up into the trees because she was the fastest going up. They were completely surprised because they thought, now we are going to ask an old lady to climb the trees. 

Actually to shoot the trees or a person, for me, it’s almost the same. So to find the right angle to look at someone, but in this case look at someone in a tree, and how to establish this connection with the people in trees, are pretty much the same. It was as important that the trees would be all the same level as us in the sense of expression and presence.

How did you achieve the very distinctive lighting in the nighttime scenes?

This is all day for night. I did one test with lighting, but it was absolutely impossible for us because it’s a very, very low budget film, and we would have to illuminate everything. From the beginning, I was sure we would do day for night. There are no electric lights in the film. We worked with sunlight. 

Because I grew up in this region, I knew that the complete black night doesn’t exist because the moon is always there. There is always light. I remember sometimes I had to close my window so the light of the moon wouldn’t be so strong. When I was working with Gonçalo [Ferreira] who did the grading with me, I was always asking him for more clarity, more light. And he was always, “No, really?”, and then he understood. It’s a lot of work also in grading, how we articulate all of these shadows and light. But it’s the light of God – it’s the sun.

Because I was shooting for four years, at one point I knew which tree we could shoot, which time of the day. I knew the light and more or less how long the light would be there. It was like being a painter. So then we would just have to go there and catch the right moment.

How did you find your actors? Some of them are workers themselves?

Some of them are workers. Maybe half of them. These are people that I know, some I grew up knowing because they’re from the village. I’ve known Maria Caterina for many years. She used to work with my father because he has some vineyards, and she was a friend of my grandmother. Some of the dialogues that she’s saying are from her, especially when she’s talking with Antonio, her husband, who passed away.

Have they watched the finished film?

No, because I wanted to show them in the theatre. I tried to bring them to Locarno [where the film had its world premiere], but they invented all kinds of things. Some were true, but some were like, I’m not getting into a plane. So they couldn’t come. But the film is going to show in Doclisboa, so they’re coming to Lisbon to see it. And then we are going to do a proper opening in the city, because I thought I would want them to see the film together with everyone in town. So we are waiting for that.

You’ve said before that you didn’t study cinema. You studied music, philosophy and theatre. But are there filmmakers who have influenced you?

Oh, so many. I didn’t want to study cinema because I wanted to find out how to do it [for myself]. Of course, I’ve seen many, many films. I think this was the best way to learn, to understand how it was done and look at points of view of the camera, distance, space, time. But I think it’s really unconscious while you are working – a feeling of why you put a camera here or why you cut in a certain point, or why the light should be centred in some place. It’s very intuitive, I think.

I have a friend who calls me Stroheim – not so much because of the films. But Griffith, Stroheim and Fritz Lang… each of us has important filmmakers or certain regions [we love]. 

Kiarostami is very important and also I feel there’s lots of connections between Alentejo and the landscape in Iran, and the way Iranian filmmakers approach working with non-actors, for example. And of course Chantal Akerman is one of the most important filmmakers to me. But then there are the filmmakers everyone is talking about when they see my films – Jean-Marie Straub and others – which I understand. But there are so many others in the history of cinema that are present somehow. 

Fire of Wind screens at the 68th BFI London Film Festival.