Vieirarpad

The film focuses on the correspondence exchanged by the couple Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szènes, between 1932 and 1961. In this snippet of a documentary record, the letters and the intimacy of their words are a pretext for the exploration and restoration of an intimate and powerful visuality, where the memory of the 20th century - and the many exiles and isolations that marked it - is articulated with the visual work of Vieira and Arpad, dotted with iconographic elements of their own lives and audio- visual material of the time. Filmed in Lisbon, Paris, Lyon, Dijón, Yèvre-le-Châtel and Rio de Janeiro, Vieirapad composes an audiovisual braid in which memory, poetry and intimacy sought to rescue, in the proximity of images, sounds and montage, the intimate land- scapes that the violence of the century episodically tore apart. The narrative is presented in flashback: the film begins in the cemetery of Yèvre-le-Châtel, next to the common grave of Vieira and Arpad, who enter the film as beings from another world, inviting us to follow their story, the geographies, real and imaginary experiences that have crossed paths, their mutual love and their shared passion for art.

A memorial and a monument, the film is conceived as a restoring operation on time and History, in which desire and love were the engines of resistance fed by the fuel of an indefeasible union. A union that precisely for this reason can be further understood and celebrated here in its artistic and political repercussions. Through cinema and its articulations, the film sets on to fulfill the final destination of this exceptionally valuable correspondence, which is also an ode to a simple and admirable happiness. (Zulfilmes)