SORTES

by Mónica Martins Nunes

In the beginning, I wanted to film my grandfather to document his masterful storytelling with which I grew up. But as I landed in Lisbon to film, I had to go directly to the hospital to see him. Oblivious to the context of a crowded emergency room, there he started singing to me, in a withering voice, a traditional song called “Meu lírio roxo do campo” (My Purple Lily of the Fields). That is where his mind was at and how he was.
I began making this film after his death, while visiting the ruins of what was once his and his family ́s house. In hindsight, SORTES was my personal way of mourning and continuing his art of storytelling in the way I could...

In "Serra de Serpa" there are many “montes”, traditional rammed earth houses returning to the same earth with which its walls were once built. As if accepting the dominant horizontality,
they let themselves get swallowed by the ground, leaving almost no trace behind. Like they had not seen countless people ploughing, seeding, harvesting, kneading and eating; not
heard the poetry and the storytelling; not witnessed droughts, desertification, soil erosion, the rise of industrial farming in the region, and people leaving in search for a better life.
The apparent lethargy of the passing days, seasons and years conceals a greater cycle, the one that brought people and took them away.
Once the largest barren land of the country, "Serra de Serpa" was split into 5516 equal parcels of land. These were given for free and by chance (à sorte) to the inhabitants of the region.
They started to be called sortes (fortunes), and there, sortes is still used as a land measuring unit. Many were fortunate to receive a Sorte, many sold it for little. My grandfather used to tell, some were given away for glasses of wine.
Each then built earth houses (montes) onto their sortes and started clearing and farming the land to make bread, olive oil, cork and others.
For a century, these isolated farmers worked very hard for their subsistence with little to no infrastructure. But this solitude was also channeled into stories. Work was sung and life ́s harshness turned verse.

SORTES makes a subjective portrait of Serra de Serpa and surroundings with its subsistence farmers whose lifestyle is becoming more and more obsolete.
A tale told from the viewpoint of the subjects, farmers and remaining popular poets like Eulálio Alves, a lifelong shepherd turned swineherd that makes poetry, specifically “Décimas”. Structured verses that are kept in his trained memory for he cannot read or write.
Or “Ti Chico dos Melões”, a farmer, charcoal maker and peddler living in a container with half a hectare of melons that he sells from village to village, writing his poetry in between stops.
Despite the specificity of this place, the problems lived by this community can be understood in a global context, as a pars pro toto. The loss of rurality and replacing of small-scale farming (and adjacent cultures) by industrial farming is felt not only here but in many parts of the world.

In my work I portray people and traditions in the shadow of a fast, efficient society that wants to be all-encompassing.
Stubbornly yet fortunately, life insists to exist in other inconspicuous manners.