Porto hosted the shooting of João Vladimiro and Luís Palito’s new film, O Desaparecimento dos Pirilampos, with the support of Filmaporto. Crossing real elements with a fictionalised narrative, the story follows a group of city centre inhabitants, from which three unique characters stand out: João, Baptista and Paulo — men of different ages, origins and backgrounds, but united by a fraternal bond.
Sharing a common space, the three characters embark on a solitary journey in search of something undefined and personal — a path where they lose themselves and find themselves again, in a continuous dance between the concrete and the abstract, the tangible and the ephemeral. It is precisely this restless search that connects them, while their individual stories intertwine in a plot of transformation and resilience.
The starting point for O Desaparecimento dos Pirilampos is a true event: the eviction of a small pub called O Balcão and its founder, cook and employee, João Cristo. The abrupt change from a business with decades of history to a new embryonic space — a strange ‘castle’ where João will have to start again — inspires a reflection on a city in constant transformation. ‘From these deaths and births that the city imposes, we created a dreamlike space, where the laws and rules of Men and Time don’t apply so intrusively,’ explains João Vladimiro and Luís Palito.
Shot mostly in the S. Vítor and Fontaínhas neighbourhoods, the film came to life through a cast — made up of Ana Soares, João Cristo, Caco, Paulo Mota and Rui Pedro Baptista — most of whose performers live or have lived in these areas. More than just a setting, the city ends up becoming a fundamental element of the narrative, moulding the stories and destinies of the characters. “Porto influences the entire course of this Disappearance because the film was born by the river and water is deeply linked to the metaphor we are proposing. Along an extinct railway line that stretches up the Douro to Barca d’Alva, our palpable earthly limit, we search for its origin as a way of trying to understand its journey and its end, just as we try to understand the path of the city and these last fireflies that inhabit it,” the filmmakers conclude.
This feature film is thus a poetic and melancholic portrait of a city in mutation, where spaces, like people, carry with them stories of resistance and reinvention. O Desaparecimento dos Pirilampos is produced by OPTEC Filmes.
