Existing in the space between philosophy and art, Portuguese filmmaker Tiago Hespanha’s heady and striking documentary Campo is a rigorous look at ritualism, the indifference and boredom it breeds, and our perpetually tenuous place in the universe.
Campo finds Hespanha visiting the Alcochete Firing Range just outside of Lisbon; a place of many natural wonders that also happens to be the largest military base in Europe and one of the home bases for Portugal’s Air Force. While soldiers in training go about their sometimes monotonous, sometimes dangerous daily duties, the natural world around them remains unchanged, and even thriving in some respects. Through his observations and the grafting of classic mythologies and philosophies over the images, Hespanha looks at the duality of the word “campo,” which in Latin represents both a place for soldiers to fight upon and the area where animals graze and raise their young.
Campo sounds precisely like the kind of free-thinking exercise that could very quickly lose whatever threads it was trying to weave, but Hespanha’s execution is flawless. Hespanha’s images are stunning (paratroopers falling through the skies like dandelion seeds, sheep in a foggy pasture, teeming beehives buzzing with activity while their keeper drones on about his duties in cataloguing them), and all of them link up nicely with the film’s ideas about nature’s indifference towards humanity and our inability at times to discern reality from fiction. Even moments of life and death – both human and animal – are treated with a certain amount of distance, not from Hespanha, but from nature and humanity alike. Hespanha also allows for some of the soldiers and people he meets along the way (including a birdwatcher and a budding piano prodigy) to share their own philosophies, enriching the experience of Campo even further and even making room for a thoughtful subtext regarding the ways we communicate with nature and each other..
Campo is an intellectually fascinating bit of work that seems to support the idea that living creatures were created only because the gods got bored. It’s a near perfect blend of romanticism and fatalism that will make like-minded viewers look at the world around them in new and exciting ways.
Thursday, April 25, 2019 – 5:45 pm – TIFF Bell Lightbox 3
Friday, April 26, 2019 – 12:15 pm – Scotiabank Theatre 3
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