Short synopsis:
Unable to afford rent, Clara (29) and Salomon (36) stay in a house her family owns in Cabanas de Tavira, a small fishing town in the Algarve. Their beaten-up car (21) narrates the film they shoot together: it tells the story of a town hollowed out by seasonal tourism, where the couple of filmmakers encounter traces of community, political hope, and the ghost of a late grandfather.

Director statement:
Still—moving is narrated by me and my car, a moving-place that encapsulates the unrootedness that becomes natural in times of globalisation and housing precarity. It looks at the daily life of Amigos Unidos de Cabanas, a neighborhood I didn’t know about, even though I’ve spent vacations in Cabanas since I was born. It carries a legacy of collective organisation, as it was built within the context of a political programme briefly put in place after the Carnation Revolution, the SAAL*. The Residents’ Association, where two characters of the film meet periodically, risks disappearing as the residents get older and pass away. Extending my previous work on animism, the film examines how manual gestures change places, making them “propagate new ways of being” (G. Bachelard). As Odília and Maria Teresa’s hands, the same that built their neighborhood over 50 years ago, craft objects using recycled materials, I learn mechanics to take care of my car. They place their artifacts around the little square turning it into “the heart of Cabanas”; my car gets agency. I speculate about these places and my family’s house, a vacation house that gained depth when I learned that my grandfather, who died before I was born, wished to live there for the first time – I feel a connection with him. (FIDLab Catalogue)


*An unparalleled state program that emerged after the 1974 Carnation Revolution, in which architects and technical brigades supported populations living in housing poverty in building their own homes.