Kids Session 2

Ideal for teens and adults interested in animation, from all cultures and speaking languages. In Portuguese with subtitles in English

 

In collaboration with:

Gothenburg

Sat 30 Sep
12:45 — Hagabion

 
 

My Grandfather’s Demons / Os Demónios do meu Avô

 

  • PRODUCTION YEAR: 2022

    GENRE: Fiction

    DIRECTOR: Nuno Beato

    COUNTRY: Portugal

    FILM DURATION: 1h 30m

    AGE LIMIT: 6

  • Rosa is a successful professional. The sudden death of the grandfather who raised her and the feeling of not having returned that love, bring her back to the home where she was raised.

    Thanks to a series of letters and clues she discovers that her grandfather left her an important task that will help her make peace with herself and others, while she repairs her grandfather’s past mistakes.

  • LANGUAGE: Portuguese

    SUBTITLES: English

  • Rosa, is a young girl very committed to her career, is one of the most promising human resources of her company. Between work and regular visits to the gym, she has little time left for social life, except for her cat.

    Rosa, is a young girl very committed to her career, is one of the most promising human resources of her company. Between work and regular visits to the gym, she has little time left for social life, except for her cat.

    Rosa has not seen or talked to him for years. She abandons the city to go to her grandfather’s property, where she grew up, and which she has just inherited and is thinking of selling. Once there, Rosa finds the clay statuettes that her grandfather Marcelino made, which represent a strange and grotesque vision of himself and the people around him: the clay demons.

    Rosa’s childhood memories and the after shocks of Marcelino’s life assail the young woman in strange dreams in which the characters take on the appearance of these clay demons, such as the six-legged bull representing her grandfather.

    Marcelino was not appreciated in the village of Vale de Sarronco, which gave Rosa a cold reception. Tired of the hostility of the inhabitants towards her, Rosa decides to leave when Chico, her 6 year old neighbour, asks her to help his mother who has had an accident. Against all odds, the impetuous Rosa becomes friends with the sweet Laura, who reveals to her the curse of the Vale de Sarronco. There is no water anywhere since Marcelino lost his wife, who drowned in the river; nowhere except on Marcelino’s property. The villagers believe that he and his bad temper are the cause.

    Rosa wants to prove that she is different from her grandfather and challenges herself to give the water back to the people of Vale de Sarronco.

    Her quest will lead her to fight against her own demons, which are the same of Marcelino. And to find the water, the help of the six-legged bull will not be too much...

More about the movie, the technique and the inspiration


My Grandfather Demons is being conceived in a way that it may reach several ages. It’s a cinematographic text in layers, such that may allow this film to raise interest from different generations, becoming a film to be seen (and shared and discussed) in family.

2 distinctive techniques

This film has two moments well marked by distinctive techniques, with these being of vital importance for the narrative construction. The digital animation has smooth colour settings, without texture, and the characters have no contour and little detail.



The colours are in a spectrum that approaches grey and, as a rule, cold tones. All these aspects reflect Rosa’s life in the city. In contrast, there is the stop motion, marked above all by the texture of clay, element earth, earth the grandfather modelled. That village is also the land that Rosa feels is hers, which sends her back to the past, to the feeling, to the humanization of this character.


The inspiration for the clay gures that the grandfather models comes from the traditional portuguese symbolic gures, mainly from the artisan Rosa Ramalho. In the area of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro, in northern Portugal, the Caretos are characters incarnated by the villagers during festivities, a tradition with Celtic origins connected to the Winter Solstice. The landscape represented in the film has a strong influence of the landscapes of Trás-os-Montes, mainly of the Natural Park of Montesinho, located in the border area with Galicia (Spain).

 
Frames Communication2023