It is a painful film about a programmed death by a disease that hardly forgives. It is a refreshing film about the passion for life and the beauty of things. Joaquim Pinto, a man of cinema (actor, director, sound engineer who seeks the most innovative) who has been suffering from AIDS for twenty years, decides to keep a photo diary of his year of treatment in 2012. He follows a new medical protocol with his partner, whom Nuño has married. He records the stages of this battle day by day. Neither complacency nor pity. On the contrary, as if the disease has sharpened his attention to everything around him, he plays with the grace of a dragonfly with what we might call coquettishness, with his round eye in front of the camera that he suspends in a long shot on the red fury caused by a nearby fire and on the care taken to replant the young trees that will replace the charred trunks. “We had no rain, and the summer was hot,” he says in the fall, noting that a small well-watered oak tree has grown, but here they are all ready to go and live. » It is the same look he had in his own days, panting along the narrow country roads where the two men found refuge, long evenings of exhaustion and clear mornings in a village, as if he were waking up to the sun of a new day. . And the love of his dogs, big, clumsy animals who spare no effort to encourage him to stay there for them, who desperately need his affection. All this without pathos, a daily shoot. So, in this year sharing everything, even the embrace, with the one he loves, Joaquim turns over what his life has been like, the passports of a young traveler, the Super 8 films of childhood, the meetings and excerpts from reviewed films, the filmmakers he worked with. And he loved working very much. It is not a withdrawal into oneself, on the contrary: the crisis in Portugal, the demonstrations in Greece pass, not away from the camera, but in one's own life. The world. Rereading these few words, I realize that the word “life” comes up a lot. Because that is what this film is about: marveling at the splendor discovered by those who want and know how to see. Yes, Joaquim Pinto is alive. Let's welcome the encounter.
