Mal Viver

Five women are running an old hotel, trying to save it from inexorable decay. A long-standing, perhaps irreparable, conflict weighs down on them: they are mothers who are unable to love their daughters, who in turn are unable to be mothers. When the young Salomé arrives at the hotel, old wounds are reopened. Caught between resentment and the search for a way out, her mother, Piedade, makes a drastic decision. João Canijo constructs a space that seems to absorb the characters’ states of mind. Like a Strindberg play or a Rivette film, dark images and twilight colours reflect the ritual nature of gestures and the complexity of relationships. What are we and what do we become when the past looms and the present seems to offer no way out? Canijo does not provide one answer but instead multiplies the points of view, creating a structure that takes into account the different interpretations of time and space, and the human beings who pass through them. (Berlinale)