Convento

Disturbingly Beautiful
If you want to be transported to a different universe with robot mules, ants and bird skulls that have been reanimated (c'mon, who doesn't?), then you need to watch this film. The cinematography is reminiscent of 60s and 70s horror and sci-fi classics (imagine 'Don't Look Now' merged with 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers') with a modern spin and brilliantly beautiful close-up photography worthy of being in an art museum. The cast remind me of the type of characters Herzog works hard to find, but here, they're wonderfully three-dimensional. Jarred Alterman has engendered an entirely defamiliarizing work of visual poetry about artists living and creating within a once-vacant monastery in Portugal that will disturb and remind you that being human can sometimes be very strange. Throughout the film, the cinematography, with its long takes and ambiguously pleasing angles (it took me a few minutes to identify a bucket), creates a palpable silence that only a master director could pull off;...

Odd, interesting and beautifully photographed documentary.
An artistic and quite off-beat Dutch family unit (a mother and two adult sons) live in an abandoned monastery in Portugal.
We get a little back-story on their lives and how they got there, but mostly we focus on their lives in the here and now; the
mother, an ex-prima ballerina, and then choreographer in Holland now spends her days gardening, so the family can largely
live off the land. One son mostly cares for his horse ("my best friend") and the animals on the land, while the other creates
surreal, complex, disturbing and fascinating kinetic sculptures made from dead animals brought to macabre, nightmarish
life with gears, wires and some basic electronics.

The film doesn't dive deeply into their personalities or motives for their life choices, mostly letting us in by quietly observing
- both the family and the beautiful location itself.

The pace is quite leisurely (too much so for me at times). I didn't find the film had a lot of...



Click to Editorial Reviews