The Metamorphosis of Birds

Beatriz and Henrique got married the day she turned 21. Henrique was a sailor, and while he was away at sea for months at a time, Beatriz brought up their six children alone. She wrote him letters with news of their ups and downs at home.

Filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos is the daughter of Beatriz’s eldest son. In this epic and deeply personal family portrait, she builds on her short debut film from 2014, again focusing on her family and life in Portugal in the 20th century. But for this, her first full-length film—which has won professional, press, and audience awards at film festivals all over the world—Vasconcelos plunges deeper into her family history.

Subtle, sensitive re-enactments bring the director’s grandmother, whom she never knew, miraculously to life, and also evoke the loneliness of marriage, the melancholy of seeing children grow up, and finally, the absence of a mother (with special roles for Vasconcelos’s father and herself). A flawless expression of the universal in the personal.