Official Competition 2018

O termómetro de Galileu

Teresa Villaverde I 2018 I 105'

SYNOPSIS

Portuguese filmmaker Teresa Villaverde shares the summer with director Tonino De Bernardi, who is working on several film projects. She sits at the table with the family in the garden, also in the backseat of the car on the way home, or listens to the stories told by the woman from whom De Bernardi buys cheese.

BIOGRAPHY

Teresa Villaverde

TERESA VILLAVERDE (Portugal, 1966) had a supporting role in João César Monteiro's A flor do mar in 1986, and since then she has worked regularly in Portuguese films, thus opting for a self-taught training in the world of cinema. She made her directorial debut with A idade maior (1991) and her film Os mutantes was screened in Un Certain Regard at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.

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Critical text

The filmmaker Teresa Villaverde visits, during a summer, her friend and artistic referent Tonino De Bernardi, who lives between the city of Turin and the village of Casalborgone with his wife Mariella Navale. The director, infected with the free, spontaneous and close style of the mythical Piedmontese creator, observes Tonino’s family intimacy, his relations with his neighbours and with the family home, and documents his and Mariella’s memories and experiences. Far from a commemorative report, O Termómetro de Galileu is the serene portrait of simple existences, far from the noise of the world, but also an essay on another way of conceiving cinema. For Tonino, and by extension for Teresa, art (the cinema) is a “primary need to create something that is not in the world,” but in keeping with the idiosyncrasies of that world. Elettra, masterpiece of the Italian director and core storyline of the Villaverde film, serves as a model for an art that is always alternative and utopian. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH

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