Maureen Fazendeiro's The Seasons arrives at a moment when ecological cinema has largely colonized the doomsday register — collapse timelines, grief montages, narrated catastrophe. Her film does almost none of that. Set entirely in Alentejo, the sparsely populated rural region that covers roughly a third of southern Portugal, it proposes instead that a landscape can be read the way you read a palimpsest: layer by layer, with patience and a small tool. The film's central formal gambit is the tracking shot used as a time machine. Fazendeiro's camera moves through green hills and golden dust with the same unhurried attention in every era it visits — present-day tableaux, wartime correspondence, 17th-century myth — so that the cuts between them feel less like jumps and more like depth. The landscape doesn't change; only what we're hearing does. It's a quiet but confident structural choice. The most surprising material comes from the letters of Georg and Vera Leisner, a German archaeologist couple credited with producing the first systematic inventory of Alentejo's megalithic monuments. Their wartime correspondence, read in voiceover against the same hills they catalogued, carries a specific double grief — the joy of discovery cut through by the sadness of exile. It's a found-text strategy that pays off because the writing is genuinely good and because Fazendeiro doesn't over-contextualize it. She trusts the juxtaposition. The oral tradition sequences are riskier and more uneven. A circle of elders — one woman singing a lament about the rise of fascism and fall of socialism — is striking as a document and slightly inert as cinema. The Salazar dictatorship context arrives as felt absence rather than stated history, which suits the film's register but may leave viewers without Portuguese history doing quiet homework. The 17th-century myth re-staging is the film's boldest formal leap: a full imaginative reconstruction inside what has otherwise been an observational documentary. It lands, though barely. What holds the whole thing together is Fazendeiro's understanding that geography is not neutral. Alentejo has been fought over, catalogued, sung about, farmed, and archaeologically excavated — and the film argues that all of these acts are forms of the same attention. The archaeological dig in the opening frames, a small tool working beneath layers of golden dust, is the film's thesis image. Every subsequent scene is an iteration of that gesture: careful, slow, trying not to destroy what it uncovers. The weakness, and it's worth naming, is that the film's formal elegance occasionally tips into ceremony. There are passages where the beauty of the landscape and the intelligence of the concept are doing more work than the images themselves. Fazendeiro is clearly a filmmaker of real precision — the Leisner sequences alone confirm that — but some of the observational stretches feel more like demonstration than discovery. A solo debut, though, and a confident one. For the right viewer — someone who reads landscape writing, who has spent time with essay film, who finds the Leisner letters as quietly devastating as they are — this is exactly the kind of cinema that makes the rest of the week's films feel slight.
