Patrícia Neves Gomes

Film

Carta Postal is a fictional short film project that tells the story of a woman in her fifties who, after being alone for several years with no one to talk to, decides to sell her voice to earn some money. One day the phone rings, but her inability to communicate leads her on a silent journey with the mysterious voice over the phone, a journey through time, space, memories and desires shared and repressed. In this film, based on this narrative premise but also on a long-standing desire to incorporate my vast collection of postcards into a film, I explored the discrepancy between image and sound – between the figure of this woman that we can see but not hear, and the voices at the other end of the line that we can only hear but not see. I also studied the relationship between still and moving images, their grammatical possibilities in cinema, to represent a certain time, a certain space. To do this, I filmed on a set using a device that integrates rear-projection still images as sets and scenic elements in the film. These still images are both photographs taken by me and postcards I’ve collected over the years, and they underline the silence of the heroine, this woman who has given up her voice, dissolving only in a final sequence that incorporates the main postcard which was my starting point for writing the film.

Patrícia Neves Gomes

Patrícia Neves Gomes was born in Porto, Portugal, in 1994. She studied photography with her grandfather from an early age and film at secondary school, where she made her first school film, which was shown at various national film festivals and exhibitions. At university, she went on to study film, specialising in documentary and, later, art curating. She co-curated the exhibition “Do Lugar Onde Estou Já Fui Embora” in 2019. She has worked in the fields of theatre, dance and performance with Vasco Araújo, Vera Mantero, Olga Roriz, Tânia Carvalho at the Teatro Nacional São João, MAAT. In the film industry, she has produced film festivals, short films and feature films, and worked on distribution. In 2023, she presented *O Jardineiro do Convento / A Jardineira do Convento* at the Riga International Film Festival (national premiere at the Curtas Vila do Conde festival in 2024). In 2023, she also founded the production company Fátima Filmes with Marcelo Pereira.

Production

Credits