Savanna and the Mountain

The community of Covas do Barroso has been declared a World Agricultural Heritage Site. However, the Portuguese government has allowed the British company Savannah Resources to start a project there to build the largest open-pit lithium mine in Europe. Paulo Carneiro's film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival's Filmmakers' Fortnight, delves into the heart of an organised people's resistance and battle against the foreign enemy that threatens their destruction. A social cause filmed in the form of a western, where characters such as ‘the mother’, ‘the colonel’ and ‘the guardian of the kingdom’ recount their real-life experiences through the filter of fiction and humour. The result is a choral film that gives the inhabitants of this town in the north-east of Portugal a form of catharsis: a space in which to create a memory of their collective struggle.