Plot Summary:For his feature debut Monteiro creatively borrowed from traditional Portuguese legends to craft a series of echoing, parallel tales of young couples desperately escaping cruel false fathers, each couple on the run across different regions of the country and during increasingly contemporary time periods. A lyrical and profoundly cinematographic allegory with a glistening sharp political edge, Paths traces a pattern of repressive authority across Portuguese history while also pointing, with cautious optimism, towards the steady presence of youthful resistance. With its stunning choreography of landscape and use of a poetic, associative structure to evoke the longue durée of mythical time, Paths anticipates Monteiro's mid-career masterpiece Silvestre.
美如油画，乡村图景隐喻的人类简史——“周而复始的时间洪流，将裹挟着光明的荣耀直抵这座城镇。”以土地为图腾，粗粝而具有仪式感的日程生活，蕴含了葡萄牙的历史。