É tudo o que apetece * 2025
Colégio de Jesuítas (Funchal, Portugal)
“É tudo o que apetece” is a fragmentary audiovisual essay that treats Madeira not as a postcard, but as a field of tension, a place where the past persists and the present repeats in loop, producing a dizzying friction between identity, spectacle, and the right to look. Co-created by António Baía Reis, Luísa Oliveira, Luís Jesús, and Valentina Costa, the film was developed during a research-creation residency in Madeira (10–21 November 2025), within the context of the VIII Encontro Internacional Cinema & Território, in an edition dedicated to Ingmar Bergman.
The project begins with an uncomfortable but simple question: what happens when we confront the tourist/colonial images of Madeira from the 1960s with the island of today, saturated by circulation, consumption, and the spectacularization of landscape? Drawing from British Pathé archival fragments, the film places staged gestures and exoticizing frames - tourists carried by locals, bodies performing for the camera - into direct collision with contemporary footage recorded during the residency: rent-a-cars overwhelming narrow slopes, festivals (“arraiais”) accelerated into rave-like intensity, cultural symbols repeated until they become visual fetishes, and fragile natural sites turned into performative sets for tourism.
Formally, the essay refuses the safety of explanatory documentary. It avoids didactic chapters and voice-of-God narration, using montage as a mode of thinking: Madeira emerges as a visual palimpsest, where historical, symbolic, and economic layers overlap without ever fully aligning, and it is precisely this misalignment that the film insists on. Across the work, four interwoven vectors recur (without becoming “sections”): the shift from explicit coloniality (local bodies serving and performing for the visitor) to a coloniality of use (touristic circulation and “must-see experience” logic occupying and pressuring the territory); the slippage between ritual and saturation (the coded act of tasting Madeira wine versus the sensory overload of contemporary festivities); the fetishization of cultural symbols (such as the bailinho as repeatable image more than living practice); and the mounting pressure on natural landscapes where transgressive tourist gestures stop being individual accidents and become symptoms of a broader predatory relation to place.
In dialogue with a Bergman-esque sensibility, the film treats the image not as an answer but as doubt, an abyss between interiority and landscape. Madeira does not simply get filmed; it looks back. The spectator is repeatedly repositioned: Who is looking? From where? With what right? What remains outside the frame? More than a portrait of an island, “É tudo o que apetece” is a provocation and a toast at once seduced by Madeira’s unpredictable beauty and alarmed by the speed with which it is consumed. It asks the viewer to accept that the image is not here to clarify anything, but to complicate it at the exact point where thought begins.
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