The Metamorphosis of Birds review – poetic Portuguese documentary

Experimental, initially slightly inaccessible, this dramatised documentary about the family history of Portuguese first-time director Catarina Vasconcelos has a cumulative power that draws the audience into its dreamy, contemplative rhythms. Both Vasconcelos and her father lost their mothers early; she uses this as a bridge between them as they muse on the absence of these women and their effect on the lives they touched. But more than this, the film is a treasure box of family legends. The letters between Vasconcelos’s grandmother and her grandfather, a sailor, are poetically reimagined (in fact the actual letters were burned at her grandfather’s request after he died).