It’s the middle of the 1980s and Abel (Rogério Samora) “returns” home, to a village in Trás-os-Montes. It comes from France, where he spent several years and his return is motivated by revenge and trauma. we talk about miss you (1987), by Fernando Lopes, where the theme of emigration takes a turn. It was as if, years later, we were seeing the remains and traces of those who existed in a certain cinema of the 1970s, as in Behind-the-hills (1976), by António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, a film full of specters, of those who emigrated to have a better life; or even, even earlier, that desire to get out that flowed from the mouths of Paulo Rocha’s protagonists (Green Years, 1963; or Change life, 1966). In Lopes’ film, the Portugal of Europe can already be seen, with its new motorways tearing through the hills. Like this film, many others, between the 1980s and 1990s, showed a country in change, but full of the marks of time, scars that would not heal.
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