In the 2019 edition of Porto/Post/Doc, we focus on Ute Aurand's work, with the screening of several of her films and the presence of the director.

From the 1980s, Ute Aurand emerges as one of the central figures in the context of experimental cinema. Based in Berlin, it’s within a contemporary practice of 16mm filmmaking that Aurand finds her way of militancy in cinema: a cinema developed within the great daily tradition of filmed diaries, that carries on an intrinsically political character by the recovery of feminist and handcrafted practices there implied.

Among brief moments, travel footage, or particular gestures, that attract the attention of those who look, the subtle movements go far beyond narration or documentary purposes. They are part of an empathetic cinema where a silent visual dialogue is established between the one who sees and the one who’s seen. Finally, it is a particular approach to the idea of ​​portraiture, where faces and gestures are filmed over long periods of time – sometimes years. Aurand chooses to shoot her portraits for an extended time to make sure that we are facing a temporality experience; that we are facing stories that, in their particularity, are still common to all of us. 

In these portraits, that are also a collection of moments or, rather, a collection of affections, such images print with tenderness the way in which relationships develop and transform over time, and reiterate the idea that, within this derivative of life, aging and death are part of the things of this world along with beauty. As already was quoted in "Rushing Green With Horses", a leitmotif-film for this retrospective, "a child asleep in its own life".