2002 film by Rita Azevedo Gomes

A story about art and educated men, and how their art and culture reveal themselves useless in the face of the harsh realities of the 20th century life.

Joáo Bénard da Costa, director of the Portuguese National Film Archives [deceased in 2009], interviews the dean of contemporaneous film directors [96-years-old then]. Two humanists of different philosophical backgrounds, both with their long, entire lives dedicated to culture in general (music, painting, literature) and to film in particular, discuss freely, sometimes haltingly, the director's power as a creator or a magician, the philosophy beyond particular scenes in classic movies, film technique, the importance of color, sound and music to films, art versus entertainment, and much more. Their talk takes place in a museum room, seating in front of "The Annunciation" (a 1510 oil painting by João Vaz, a Portuguese artist), which eventually leads to a discussion of 'Leonardo da Vinci', and the relationship between a trend-setter master and his disciples.

Freely based on Gide ('Paludes') and Hawthorne ('Wakefield'), this is a film about a writer who never wrote anything and who blows at nightfall the breath of frost. The poem by Carlos Queiroz to which the above sentences belong is not cited in 'O som da Terra a Tremer', but the atmosphere is that, between written letters never received. Fiction within fiction, stories within stories, like those Chinese boxes in which there is always one inside another. Or the two margins of the same river, always being lateral.

Roberto is one of those men to whom simulation has become the greatest art. He is an unmoved, inscrutable, mysterious man. But the truth is that Robert feels an intimate, deep tedium. The boredom of those who have already exhausted all the pleasures of life. The only thing still surprising him is the fact that nothing surprises him anymore. One evening he has an overwhelming encounter with a woman. For his own bewilderment, he discovers the sublime horrors in which the woman has sank.

An impossible love. Two young people in love. Vera and John can't find a space nor time, nor identity in this life that can solve this love. Apparently everything is beneficial to them, their families, friends and the land where they live. The issue is time. The time they don't actually have (studies, families, distant houses) and the time of their own life - being so young they are subject to what that life brought upon them, that's when the "story" of the film begins, therefore linked to a life that until then was not chosen by them. This is one reason, which leads to a runaway process. Escape in the possible return to this world.

In 1987, during the writing process of Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle, Nouvelle Vague master Éric Rohmer decided to leave out the fifth episode of the film and develop it into a theatre play instead. Inspired by the famous Mozart piece, he called it "Le Trio en mi bémol", and it went on to premiere at the end of that year at the Théâtre Renaud-Barrault under his direction. 35 years later, Portuguese filmmaker Rita Azevedo Gomes has now taken on the play and made it her own with the help and complicity of some dear friends. Conceived by Rohmer as a "comédie brève en sept tableaux", Azevedo Gomes respects the main structure, a series of encounters between two ex-lovers who still are very fond of each other. But in her version, Paul (Pierre Léon) and Adélia (Rita Durão) extensively discuss love, passion and tenderness for the camera of a film director (legendary Spanish filmmaker Adolfo Arrieta), who teases the actors at his whim. With her usual keen eye for beauty and elegance, Azevedo Gomes draws the best not only from her actors but also from the set, a beautiful sixties modernist beach house on the coast of the Minho region.