Documentary, Highlights

Raw

Synopsis

There is compassion, dishonesty, deceit, violence, lies, betrayal, pity, loss, ruin, bitterness. There is a lot of open wounds on the prematurely aged bodies, fallen, prostrated, diseased. There are hasty judgments, delayed illusions, shared deceptions. – Lord that you are in the City have mercy on us! And the Lord said: – Go and take my compassion!

Raw is a Portuguese documentary film in its immense universality of feelings. Constructed mostly of intimate micro-narratives of relations between people and institutions. It is a mosaic of cases, episodes, scenes, livings-pictures, duels between the Social Income support and the Government budget, between Law and reason, between drug-addiction and love, sometimes between life and death. Micro-narratives successively juxtaposed only by the will of the man with the movie camera, without an apparent direction of narrative continuity, as if it was an exhibition of photographs.

As spectators we look at the portraits that go by through the narrative, building ourselves, fortunate that we are, the ethical and moral quality of the wall that holds them.

What city is this that it is shown to us during 150 minutes? What depth holds this place? How can we serve the narrative of these Porto men and women who do not cross the river?

Just serve it raw.

Technical Sheet

Title: Raw
Year: 2017
Country: Portugal
Sound: Stereo
Duration: 2h28 ‘
Color: HD
Language: English, Portuguese
Subtitles: English, Portuguese
Direction and Script: Carlos Ruiz
Editing: Carlos Ruiz
Producer: Carlos Ruiz
Color correction and graphics: Ricardo Costa
Sound and Mixing Edition: Pedro Ribeiro

Available

GuideDoc

More about the film

  • Awards

    • Honourable Mention at Avanca’s International Film Festival. Portugal, July, 2018.

  • Distribution

    • TV CANAL 180 – National Television Show in 2019
      Release date 05/29/201

  • Festivals

    DOK Leipzig
    Visions du Reel

  • Quotes

    Cru” means “rough”, “raw” or “sore”, all of which applies to this sequence of scenes by Carlos Ruiz Carmona – snapshots of the Portuguese city of Porto, collected over almost a decade. There are movie kisses and vigorously fucking bodies, trembling hands and sex for money. Communion wafers crack and teeth are knocked out. The images are anything but glamorous but highly charged: they show tense and often aggressive people. Carlos Ruiz Carmona’s Porto is a field of energy where tension keeps building and is discharged all over the place, where people are receivers or transmitters of those currents. The film seems both distant and intimate because its director, while renouncing all direct communication, is a penetrating observer. One who is most interested in the surfaces under which things are seething, ready to burst – be it in the shape of eczema, a blow or a birth.
    — Carolin Weidner

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