“Oh, get down high mountain, let my cattle pass. The girl who tends it has golden hair. On the top of that mountain where the water climbs and descends, water can’t quench my thirst, nor does my love forget.” (local song)
Rural northern Portugal unexpectedly emerges as a major player at the Cannes Director’s Fortnight in 2024. While Paulo Carneiro draws a documentary portrait of his residents in a battle against the English multinational Savannah Resources and its project to build an open pit mine to extract lithium from its beautiful mountains that should instead be preserved, Frederico Lobo accomplishes a similar feat with When The Land Runs Away, albeit with a different tone.
His work is a medium-length documentary shot on film, which much more than digital can capture the visual power of a threatened area. Northern Portugal, particularly Covas Do Barroso, has been in the sights of mining companies for some years now, especially the aforementioned one, as the new gold is called Lithium. It is needed for electric batteries and a supposed monumental green transition that actually hides many dark sides that indeed render it not very “green”.
The extraction process is long and complicated, requires a staggering amount of water, and is dangerous not only because it would disrupt the mountain’s balance by destroying it, but also because it would affect the surrounding ecosystem and the livelihoods of those who rely on that mountain for agriculture and livestock, not to mention the possible toxic chemicals spills.
Despite the area being recognized as a World Cultural Heritage site by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (2018), The Portuguese Environment Agency has already given its preliminary approval in May 2023, and work is expected to begin in 2024, prompting protests not only from locals but from a large portion of the population feeling betrayed by a government that completely disregarded the needs of the local microeconomy and ecosystem in favor of international economic maneuvers.
In Carneiro’s film, a character said: “Rich Nordics don’t care about our village, they just want to make batteries for the Germans and the Norwegians. They should destroy their own mountains”. In Savanna and The Mountain, the problem was in fact directly addressed, but Frederico Lobo did so tangentially, without ever really talking about it out loud.
The film focuses on the mountain and its inhabitants, without “making them speak,” but allowing life and daily routines, according to their slow and ancestral rhythms, to unfold naturally, without the need for many words or additions. Thus, we can gaze at the clouds enveloping the summit, a farmer hoeing his land on those gentle slopes, observe a lost cow, listen to the sound of rain, watch a dog running in the distance, or a tired herder smoking a cigarette in a bar in the evening.
And while “the mountain runs away under my feet”, life continues with its grand and small dynamics, with its perennial problems, such as the disappearance of the pregnant cow Briosa, who likely went to give birth far away.
The Barroso Lithium Mine Project is therefore an enemy looming in the background, like an anxiety that one tries not to think about but will soon take hold.
It is the dispassionate voice of a news broadcast keeping the protagonists and the audience informed: “Over the next few months, daily explosions will open up roads and then excavate 4 cuts into the mountain. Over a period of 15 years, the UK-based mining multinational will extract lithium spodumene in an opencast mine with an area of 593 hectares. During the prospecting phase, an extensive drilling campaign was carried out in the territory. In two years, 135 boreholes were drilled, described by the population as aggressive and unauthorized exploitation of common land. Excessive drillings in areas with known deposits were considered not justified by technical needs but driven by the intention of increasing share prices on the stock exchange”.
Besides a single and brief shot of the drilling, this is the only direct reference underlying issue that permeates the entire film, as it rather sounds an alarm by showcasing the lives of its inhabitants – human, animal, and natural.
Federico Lobo thus constructs a film that manages to be poetic, meditative, and spontaneous while being a film of political and social struggle, a film outside of time yet urgently contemporary, and an ecstatic film despite dealing with an inevitably painful theme.
Just as “Savanna and the Mountain” ended with an emotional gallop of one of the residents through the streets of Covas Do Barroso, this film ends with one of its protagonists, this time captured up close, in a close-up as he leans his body on his hoe and gazes at his land with an inscrutable look that may conceal the desire to fight as well as a sense of injustice and oppression.
Besides being a necessary work, “When The Lands Runs Away” once again testifies to the power of beauty, for it is impossible to watch these scenes without wanting to champion the freedom of the local Portuguese inhabitants and the preservation of the land that should remain untainted but instead, like many others, is swept away by the rush of so-called progress and the international economic and consumeristic dynamics.
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