A Present Light

"The only thing you can do now is sleep", says the older man, through the orange glow of the apartment buzzers. His distant voice says "take a pill", and there he stands, sudden in his dark coat, beside the motorcyclist. The glass of water in his hand is a delicate thing, the light upon it part of the wider evening. When the scooter starts we realise from its headlight that it is raining. "One day a sad man left home to deliver a letter".

These moments are imperfect. Making do with the wrong tools, nail polish on a banister. Making do throughout. A Present Light throughout finds detail in that making do. In getting by. Diana warns the man upon the scooter that the rain will have been making the road slippery. It is a warning too late.

Diogo Costa Amarante's film is full of the subtleties of observation, absurdities of presentation, consequences of action. This is his first short since he won a Golden Bear in 2016 for Small Town (Cidade Pequeno). His time in documentaries would seem to have informed his eye, this has the feel of the real even when it strays from what one might call the ordinary. The man who had been and then was not upon the scooter was going to deliver a letter. He meets Diana instead.

It isn't always night, but briefs moment of day are punctuated by No Entry signs, the measuring trend of an agent. These are a certain kind of streets, not just steep or cobbled. Zebra like geometric stripes by some flavour of the cities fauna of crossings. "Breath in and go for it". Still, considered, stacked doors of observation, there is as much because of its simplicities a subtlety to it. Red light on watching men. The mirrorball makes leopards of the shadows. An arch, proscenium, reflexive, artificial and neon. Who from the window watches? Who waits against the wall? Who sings without a voice? The lexicon of surrealism in cinema stretches readily from Andalusia to Mulholland, the flocked ferns of wallpaper and the jungles urban and actual that the silvered border separates.

A question asked about a garden, the garden itself a question. How far can the definition stretch? How far can anyone definition stretch? "one day a sad man left home to deliver a letter", and from that journey came this. A small thing, made of intersections, the paths that conjure them. in that space there is grounds to wonder and indeed worry about the tropes that are at play when a black trans woman serves as semi-angelic intercessor to someone else. There is magic and there is 'magical' and that can be a difficult line to cross. With a small cast these issues can be magnified, but even within its locations and the set of those within them A Present Light finds intersectionalities, layers, power.

Jorge Quintela's cinematography finds grandeur in what could be grime. Throughout the film finds the stately where others might see squalor, not by cheating focus but by delivering through diligence a dignity. There is at once a lot and nothing going on. We see a door through a door, a man looking at a man looking from either side and on either side of them both and at once. One open, one about to close. There are desires and dreams here, but real in the way they are unrealised. A circularity of outcome sealed by bookending narration. "One day a sad man left home to deliver a letter", but what happens instead is worth writing home about.