‘Living Spirit’
artists: Lua Michel, Ester Catalão and Anda Padrão
Year: 2022
★★★
In recent years, many filmmakers, especially when the protagonist is a woman, have turned to fantasy, myth, and the occult to explore questions that logic and ordinary reason struggle to answer. These narratives invite viewers into domains where the visible world meets the unseen, where ritual and superstition aren’t merely decorative but essential to understanding how people cope with pain, fear, and desire.
Cristèle Alves Meira’s debut feature Alma viva stands apart in this tradition. The film threads reality and superstition into a single, luminous fabric, seen through the eyes of Salomé, the French heroine who spends a sunlit summer at her mother’s village home tucked in the Portuguese mountains. Alma viva distinguishes itself by its clarity, its sense of fullness, and the poetic conviction with which it portrays a community grappling with brutal truths through belief and ritual. The director invites audiences to observe how these beliefs shape responses to hardship, not as escape but as a meaningful way to anchor oneself in a world that often feels irrational.
The movie reveals a profound ability to render the lead character’s gaze as an entry point into a broader web of memory and ancestry. Salomé does not simply watch the events unfold; she becomes part of a larger epic that includes the matriarchs who came before her—grandmother, mother, and aunt—women who frequently invoke magic or superstition as a counterweight to masculine dominance. Through this lineage, the film positions belief not as superstition alone but as a living archive that gives voice to resistance, resilience, and the nuanced moral landscape that emerges when tradition collides with modernity.
The narrative weaving emphasizes how the women of the village inhabit and reinterpret ritual to meet the demands of a fragile world. In such scenes, ritual functions not as a quaint backdrop but as an active force—an ambiguous tool that helps characters name fear, heal wounds, and negotiate power. The filmmaking approach mirrors this complexity: a patient, observational rhythm that lets intimate gestures become universal truths, and a visual language of light, texture, and space that makes the ordinary glow with significance. The result is a film that feels both intimate and expansive, grounded in the specifics of place while speaking to universal questions about belonging, memory, and agency.
Alves Meira’s work benefits from a deliberate, almost tactile sense of color and sound, which turns the quotidian into a ritual of perception. The audience is invited to sense the world as Salomé does: through a gaze that learns to read signs, a heart that slowly aligns with the rhythm of a community, and a mind that weighs the cost and consequence of choosing belief over disbelief. In this manner, Alma viva becomes not just a story about superstition, but a meditation on how people endure brutality by leaning on what they hold sacred. The film thus elevates its female leads by showing their insights as capable of guiding others through moments of crisis, a departure from mere backdrop to active protagonists in a shared struggle for dignity and autonomy.