Sophia September 1963

Directed by Vanessa Duarte

In the summer of 1963, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen sets off with her friend and also writer Agustina Bessa-Luís and her husband Alberto Luís, on a road trip to Greece, writing about that trip in her diary. In the summer of 2023, a couple of Portuguese filmmakers decide to follow in her footsteps using fragments of that diary, travelling by car throughout the various Greeces: the imagined one, the fragmented one; Sophia's Greece, theirs; Odysseus' Greece, no one's. "At 4:30 I set foot on Greek land. Marvellous road on the way out of Patras. We move on with the sea by our side among olive and cypress trees and bluish mountains. Light heat, scented air. The mountains link the earth to Olympus. We stop and I go wash my feet, hands, arms and face in the sea." Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen - Excerpts from the diary of her first trip to Greece, in 1963