Tabu

Pilar, a devout retiree, spends her time doing good deeds and helping others. She also looks after her lonely neighbor Aurora, an eccentric eighty-year-old woman. While Pilar devotes herself to her Catholic faith, Aurora gambles away her last money at the casino and suspects her Cape Verdean housekeeper, Santa, of casting a voodoo spell on her. As Aurora lies dying, Pilar searches for a certain Gian Luca Ventura at her request. She finds him in a nursing home, and it turns out that he and Aurora share a history dating back fifty years, to the time shortly before the outbreak of the Portuguese colonial war. "A delightfully intricate reimagining of film and Portuguese colonial history: Divided into two chapters following an introduction, the film first tells a story set in present-day Portugal about a devout elderly woman who cares for her eccentric neighbor, before delving in the second part into the neighbor’s past (or an imagined version of it), in which she experiences a melodramatic love story in an imaginary African colony during her youth. The two mirroring parts revolve, in a playful yet melancholic manner, around the evocation of what has been lost, unfulfilled longings for happiness, and colonialist projections, skillfully employing recurring visual motifs and references to film history. A captivating film on the border between classical narration and experimental film. Well worth seeing." (Lexikon des Internationalen Films)