The archive in metamorphosis: The films by Susana de Sousa Dias

At IDFA, Susana de Sousa Dias’s films invite us to reconsider the relationship between cinema and history. Her counter-archival approach interrogates how images shape memory, exposing the lingering effects of authoritarian regimes and colonial enterprises. Her Retrospective offers a rare opportunity to encounter her work in full, tracing a trajectory that connects Portugal’s past with global histories and contemporary reflections. Through her films, alongside her Top 10 selection, viewers are challenged to confront both historical realities and their ongoing echoes in the present.

The Portuguese authoritarian regime (1926-1974) is the cornerstone of de Sousa Dias’s filmography—one that explores how the shadow cast over Portugal and its former colonies by the longest-running dictatorship in Europe continues to spread into the present. In recent years, de Sousa Dias has extended her reflection on colonialism and suspended spaces by meticulously exploring the consequences of the neo-colonialist endeavour set by Henry Ford in Fordlândia, Brazil, back in 1928.

Susana de Sousa Dias is not only a prominent filmmaker, but also a respected scholar and visual artist whose work has been featured and awarded at prestigious international film festivals, as well as film seminars, universities, and cultural institutions.

She was born in Lisbon in 1962, twelve years before the Carnation Revolution brought down the Estado Novo in Portugal. As a result, her youth unfolded in a time of political awakening and a restored sense of freedom. She studied Cinema at the Lisbon Theatre and Film School, followed by a BA in Fine Arts-Painting at the Lisbon Fine Arts School. In 2005, she earned an MPhil in Aesthetics and Art Philosophy from the University of Lisbon with a dissertation on Cinema, Archive and Memory, and in 2014, she concluded her doctoral studies in Fine Arts / Video at the same university with a thesis titled Archive footage and Decelerated Movement. Filmmaking and academic research have always gone hand in hand in de Sousa Dias's career: the making of films has prompted questions that evolved into academic research, and the other way round.

IDFA audiences were relatively late to encounter de Sousa Dias’s work, with her first feature Still Life (2005) shown as part of the Re-releasing History focus program at IDFA 2019. The film was preceded by Criminal Case 141/53 (2000), a mid-length documentary that employs more conventional procedures in the use of archives to address the sadistic modus operandi of Salazar's regime through the story of two Portuguese nurses who dared to defy the codes of conduct of the time.

Now, 25 years later, the director reflects on this first attempt at documentary making with Post Criminal Case (2025), a mid-length essay set to premiere at IDFA. This filmic replica questions the notions of documentary cinema, storytelling, and archival footage through a contemplation on image, time, memory, and history—the elements that would decisively mark all the director's subsequent work.

“I always consider Still Life my first film, because it was the one that was born from something very profound (my encounter with the archives) and it was the first in which I sought to develop my own cinematic language, in a total immersion. But this immersion was only possible due to the shock I felt while making Criminal Case 141/53 and the feeling that something wasn't quite right,” de Sousa Dias explains.

Without using words, Still Life draws on war reports, newsreels, political propaganda, portraits of political prisoners, and unpublished rushes to unveil the conflicted opacity of the official imagery. The camera wanders in slow motion through those materials—stopping, reframing, going back and forth—affecting the viewer while disrupting the original purpose of those brutal documents produced by the political machine. In the director’s own words, Still Life “was a film ‘found’ through a process of theoretical reflection and practical experimentation, with many advances and retreats and phases of intermittency in the editing process.”

Her following film, 48 (2009), became her most acclaimed work to date. The feature-length essay takes its name from the duration of the Portuguese dictatorship and has become not only one of the most renowned documentary films made about that 48-year period, but also one of the most distressing.

In 48, de Sousa Dias seeks to show how the authoritarian system tried to perpetuate itself through violent mechanisms. The film is composed entirely of anthropometric photographs of political prisoners taken by the Portuguese International and State Defense Police (PIDE) to catalogue their anatomical characteristics. She recontextualises these portraits, presenting them alongside harrowing oral testimonies given off-screen by the same people featured in those images, many years later (we never see them in the present day). Memories of abuse, torture, and prison violence accompany a detailed examination of the photographs through soft camera movements, as if the lens were searching the photographs for gestures of humanity suppressed by the police. For the viewer, the portraits become much more than static frames assembled during editing: they are moving faces that reclaim ownership of their own trajectories when magnified on the cinema screen. Behind the minimal dispositive of 48 lies a tactful method of interviewing, sophisticated techniques of recording, and a meticulous conception of editing and sound design.

“It is necessary to dig to find out what was buried by the action of time, but also to dig to see what was inscribed over time,” says the director in her article Excavated Time: Uses of the Archive in Obscure Light, which delves into the method deployed in the aforementioned film.

Obscure Light (2017) originated from an identification portrait of a political prisoner, seen carrying a baby on her neck—an image from 1961, and the only anthropometric portrait in the Portuguese political police archive to feature a child. “This image sparked my interest in the children of political prisoners, as society says little about them. Who are these children today? How do they live with their memories?” de Sousa Dias explains.

Obscure Light is also based on photographs taken by the Portuguese political police, but, unlike 48, it shows the people who testify alongside their police portraits or juxtaposed with the official photographs of family members. In a striking procedure, the film reveals how, in a cruel and mechanical manner, the authoritarian system not only dismantled the intimacy of individuals but how it disrupted the emotional, psychological, and mental state of entire families.

Her following film, Journey to the Sun (2021), co-directed with Ansgar Schaefer, premiered at IDFA's feature-length competition the same year. It expanded the conversation around childhood during the dictatorship by telling the stories of Austrian children sent to Portugal in the aftermath of World War II, in search of a sunny land and affectionate carers who could help them to rebuild their lives torn apart by war. The filmmakers use archives of different sources and tonalities—not only official material, as in her previous works, but also home movies taken by the wealthy foster families. The images coexist with, and often counterpoint, the testimonies of the characters, now elderly, who revive with astonishing clarity the bleakest times of the post-war period.

Journey to the Sun portrays the characteristic findings of de Sousa Dias's work: the change of speed of images, reframing, slow fades into black that encapsulate sequences, a soundtrack composed of dissonant sounds, as well as an expanded silence. All these devices pave the way for the testimonies that arrive promptly, filled with emotion and unresolved pain.

Fordlandia Malaise (2019) and Fordlândia Panacea (2025) form a new chapter in the director’s artistic practice. These mid-length films explore the memory and present of Fordlândia, the company town Henry Ford founded in the Amazon rainforest in 1928 to break the British rubber monopoly and supply materials needed for U.S. automobile plants. Today, however, the remains of the site and the reflections of its inhabitants remind us of the failure of this disproportionate enterprise.

Even though the diptych introduces a partial rupture of the formal devices rigorously explored in her previous works, the reflection on colonialism continues, unfolding further scars in latitudes new to her work. Fordlândia, as a setting suspended in time, also presented de Sousa Dias with new narrative possibilities, such as the use of drones and sensory experimentation.

Fordlândia Panacea will have its world premiere at IDFA's Envision Competition. The film highlights the spiritual (and feminine) connection of the characters with the land, elevating the principle that only their profound communion with nature and spirit has prevented the colonialist project from exterminating the ancestral land, because a stronger force persists. And so, a film that can be seen as formalist and conceptually rigorous, opens almost magically to an existential questioning.

The Susana de Sousa Dias Retrospective comprises eight films, accompanied by a Top 10 specially curated by her. When asked about the motivations behind her selection, she explains that “instead of ‘showing’ the world, these films interrogate the devices that make it visible and audible.”

“Several possible constellations exist in dialogue with one another: archive and counter-archive; regimes of visibility and subterraneanities; colonialism and solidarity; the politics of sound and the politics of listening, etc.”, she adds. For her, “the selection can be organized into two movements: ‘From the sky to the underground’ and ‘From film to public activation’.”

When placed together with her own works, de Sousa Dias’s selection takes on a wider resonance. The words with which she concludes the justification also fit her oeuvre like a glove, inviting us to approach all films critically, as living pieces of today: “A set of films that, among other things, makes us think about something we thought had remained in the past and that, ultimately, haunts our present: the metamorphoses of fascism.”

This editorial was published in the IDFA 2025 Program Guide.
See the full Program Guide here.