Mar Portugues is an experimental short conceived as a surreal enactment of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's last dream, as he lay dying in Cochin in India. Departing from Fernando Pessoa's poem Mar Portugues, the film invokes the fictive space of cultural imaginings, as a sea muse and the ghost of Gama's daughter haunt the shores of contemporary urban Lisbon. Created as a hallucination on the Tagus River, this surreal staging of colonial history intertwines collective memories and traces of the past with the cultural practices of the present. Tanzanian born director May Joseph and Portuguese performer Sofia Varino bring these historical sea voyages into real time through the sounds and movements of Portuguese speaking Africa and India at the iconic Cais das Colunas port.
