“NORTHFORK” 2003 | 1h43’ [US] | SUBMERGED LIVES Cinema Screenings

### Ciclo VIDAS SUBMERSAS

[SUBMERGED LIVES Cinema Screenings]
(Curadoria de Alexandre Braga)

“NORTHFORK” 2003 | M/12 | 1h43’ [US]

De Michael Polish

Sábado Dia 28/02 às 19h30 [Saturday 02/28 at 7:30pm]

Passado em 1955, os habitantes de uma pequena comunidade no Montana são obrigados a deslocar as suas casas para
dar lugar a uma nova barragem.

Set in 1955, the residents of a small Montana community are forced to move their homes to make way for a new dam.

Spoken in English | Subtitled in Portuguese
IMDB
Trailer

Mais info:
More info:
https://prosacultural.org/cinema/vidassubmersas

SUBMERGED LIVES is born from a long-standing unease: the silent question that remains when technical progress advances over living memory. What happens when the promise of energy, development, and future demands— as its counterpart—the erasure of centuries of coexistence, of minimal rituals, of an affective geography that cannot be translated into megawatts?
Recent history is marked by these forced submersions. In Portugal, the village of Luz, in Alentejo, and Vilarinho de Furnas, in the North, became symbols of a modernity that displaces not only bodies and houses, but also temporalities, bonds, and ways of inhabiting the world. The case of Foz Côa—halted by the discovery of Paleolithic rock engravings—reminds us, almost tragically, that not all losses are acceptable, and that some images resist being drowned by time.

In Farewell (1983), by Elem Klimov, this violence is enveloped in an austere, deeply ritualistic lyricism. Matyora is not merely a doomed village: it is a spiritual organism witnessing its own extinction. The old woman hiding among the ruins of the tree, the repeated gestures, the collective states of torpor—all point to a desperate attempt to metabolize the unthinkable. The film does not dramatize the conflict; it observes it as one would attend a prolonged funeral, where acceptance is not consensus but exhaustion.

Northfork (2003), by Michael Polish, transposes this experience to rural America in the 1950s. Here, submersion is filtered through an almost ethereal aesthetic, close to dream and fable. The small Montana community lives its expulsion as if suspended between two worlds: the one that dissolves and the one that never truly arrives. It is a film of delicate formal beauty, where the violence of progress manifests less through shock than through the melancholy of an irreversible farewell.

This cinematic gesture resonates across other geographies and languages. In Still Life (2006), Jia Zhangke films the demolitions caused by the Three Gorges Dam as a daily life in slow dissolution, where ruins coexist with the absurd and the banal. The activist work of Chen Qiulin, meanwhile, transforms the displacement of her hometown into a practice that stitches together memory, body, and loss—an intimate gesture that is also profoundly political.

SUBMERGED LIVES thus proposes a space of listening and contemplation. It is not about condemning progress nor romanticizing the past, but about acknowledging the invisible cost of these decisions. Each submerged village is also an interrupted narrative, a broken ritual, a form of life that finds no translation in technical discourse. Cinema becomes, here, a site of resistance: a final shore where these lives continue—not on the surface of the water, but on the surface of memory.

All Cinema PROSA films will be shown on an illuminated pixel (65’’ QLED screen) in a room with a maximum capacity of 24 spectators.

Come and have a glass of wine or a non-alcoholic drink in the cinema room with us!