Ruins

(Ruínas). Manuel Mozos’s fugue film captures the decaying beauty of the Portuguese landscape. Contemplative long takes of the ruins of empty castles, crumbling pilgrim’s quarters, dilapidated factories, and abandoned homes are coupled with voiceover narration of documents from the buildings’ eras: plague notices from the sixteenth century, the love letters of a nun from the seventeenth, even hotel-booking requests from the early twentieth. Ruins has a quiet visual poetry similar to the landscape cinema of James Benning, only fleshed out with a saudade-fueled sorrow that seems to ooze from the Portuguese setting.

—Jason Sanders

• Photographed by Luís Miguel Correia. (60 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, Color, Digital video, From O Som e a Fúria)