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João Pedro Rodrigues won the Best Director prize at Locarno for this playful, homoerotic and decidedly unconventional Catholic parable.
Losing control of his kayak in North Portuguese rapids, a birdwatcher wakes up in a forest, tended to and then tied up by a pair of Chinese women on a pilgrimage. From here, he encounters a series of ever more bizarre and fantastical situations – a goatherd with a penchant for skinny-dipping; masked demons conducting a pagan ritual; and a posse of Amazon women wielding shotguns – that take him ever closer to spiritual fulfilment.
Inspired by the mediaeval journeys of Saint Anthony of Padua, this film by João Pedro Rodrigues (The Last Time I Saw Macao, MIFF 2013) is a surreal, genre-hopping delight; one that deftly blends queer sensuality with Christian allegory.
'How it would look if Alain Guiraudie and David Lynch got together to remake Buñuel's The Milky Way.' – Film Comment
