The Portrait of Gaia (2020) is a film made from a mobile phone and is based on the Sci-Fi genre. The film explores the image as a dissimulating object of reality and tells the story of a restless man, isolated from the world to which he belongs, as a metaphor for the supremacy of the consumption of images by today’s societies, which absorb him into a cluster of visual information, diverting him from his purpose as a thinking man and, therefore, from his own human nature.
Inside a space station adrift in space, a man tries to understand his origin and himself. It is through images that record the events on Earth, whose mission was to capture them from space, that he seeks a return to his humanity.
When I registered the images for the making of the film, I realized that, to work on them, they could not be in their original form, but be similar to another reality. In other words, I was interested in exploring another filmic dimension that reflected a thought associated with its conception as a “cosa mentale” (1). For this reason, we can affirm that the images that make up “The Portrait of Gaia” hide being what they are. Although the cinematographic dimension has always been the expression of the simulation of reality proposed to the collective imagination, it is also, in fact, a dissimulation because it hides the fraction of the time in which real life takes place. Indeed, it is still “a principle of creation, a way of thinking, a way of conceiving films associating images” (1), in the sense that life owes its own representation to cinema.

(1) AMIEL, Vincent (2016) Estética da Montagem. Lisboa: Edições Texto & Grafia.

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