Portugal

82′, 2020.

DIRECTED BY

Cláudia Ribeiro

PRODUCED BY

Uma Pedra no Sapato

CINEMATOGRAPHER

Cláudia Ribeiro

EDITED BY

Cláudia Ribeiro, João Miller Guerra, Raul Domingues

In a hamlet of Portugal’s remote inland, between the rivers Douro and Tâmega, there live about thirty people. At the top of a hill, we find sisters Ana and Glória living in an isolated place which the baker, the fishmonger, the grocer, and their children visit once a week. Everything else comes from the soil, which the two sisters work from sunrise to sunset, amidst the strips of farmed land. We follow the agricultural cycle over the course of a year as the relationship between the director and the protagonists ripens. The veil is lifted on these women’s day-to-day lives and their deepest thoughts about life in the countryside, the only life they know.

Cláudia Ribeiro is from Guimarães in the North of Portugal, and currently lives in Porto. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Film and a Master’s in Anthropology - Visual Cultures. Her work is focused mainly on the concepts of culture and identity, moved by a constant questioning of human behavior, memory, representation, and the concept of reality. The Life We Know is her debut in documentary film, the result of 7 months of painstaking fieldwork in a small inland village in northern Portugal.