Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: ELES TRANSPORTAN A MORTE [International Film Festival Rotterdam 2022 - Virtual]
The texture of "Eles Transportan A Morte" (This Means Death) [Bright Future] is structured in an idea of consequence and perspective. Three men are seemingly abandoned or deserted when Christopher Columbus sails to the New World in 1492. In a reflective bit that seems to take place back in Spain, a woman talks about one of the men who was sent on the ship across the sea because he would have been killed in Spain for his crimes. It is an interesting mode on existence because whether in Spain or the New World, life takes turns that make one question the idea of what life is. As a notion of penance or an ode on belief, either outcome points to ruin. For the men on the other side of the sea, it is about survival but in service of that bleakness, since there is no civilization around. The thought cards at times (using voice over or, at the every end, title cards) speak to the future aspect that Europeans are the ones who brought sickness to the natives of the New World.
An alternate play on history with one of its personalities is also challenged but it is meant more as a metaphor than anything else. Back in Spain, the connected woman tries to save a girl who seemingly fell or tried to take her life. She is a vessel lost in her own sea among people but is aware. What is interesting in this context is the response from the older woman who helps care for her who keeps repeating "I Don't Remember" which is much different than "I Forgot". These different interludes are captured in whispered mediations or in darkness as fire lights up the screen either for warmth or cleansing.. The metaphor of the film speaks to seeds that are buried after they are burned and are renewed again. The metaphor is that, unlike the human dead and the ancestors that came before them, we as the human race sometimes despite our generations cannot see anew. It is an interesting motif on the nature of being because it points to the fact of a one way trip and that sometimes a divergence simply sets one back on the same path by a different route. B-
BY Tim Wassberg
