Bulakna

While a teenager prepares to leave home and waits for the call that would offer her the Holy Grail, a woman placed in a luxurious house in Portugal returns and finds no one is waiting for her.
Observing everyday life, listening to landscapes and people alike, Bulakna – named after an ancient warrior who resisted colonial invasion – gives time to time. The documentary places its protagonists at the centre of a subsistence-based existence, whether fishing or housework, to paint a complex and nuanced portrait of the country's postcolonial economic relations, where a third of the native population works abroad.

Leonor Noivo delicately weaves together threads and intertwines several registers, not hesitating to break free from an observational logic to open onto fictional sequences that tell, in particular, of the resistance to the arrival of the colonists.
Her lucid, sensitive and poetic approach places the Philippines at the heart of a globalised world, while offering these women the opportunity to tell their stories.

Rightholder: nevena.desivojevic@terratreme.pt