At the invitation of Cinex, part of the expanded cinema programming line of Braga 25 Capital Portuguesa da Cultura, two artists have collaborated on a project where the music of British artist Matthew Herbert interacts with the images and temporal narrative of Daniel Blaufuks.
In 2023, Portuguese artist Daniel Blaufuks created the short film ‘Naquele Dia em Lisboa’, utilizing footage from the National Archive of Moving Images (ANIM) shot in 1940. The film chronicles the arrival of thousands of European refugees, mainly Jews, in Portugal, as they sought to escape the war and Nazi terror spreading across the continent.
This year, under the invitation of Cinex, Blaufuks expanded the film to “slow the time of this unknown day in 1940, inviting audiences to experience and feel its rhythm,” according to a statement about the cine-concert curated by Eduardo Brito and João Paulo Macedo.
Inspired by this film, musician Matthew Herbert created an original soundtrack, capturing the essence of streets and people who anonymously served as ghostly guides to freedom.
“Besides the year and the author — cinematographer and Oscar-winner Eugen Schüfftan — little else is known about this discarded footage, now shared with the public through this expanded photography by Daniel Blaufuks, who is also a descendant of Jewish refugees from Germany and Poland,” the statement adds.
The narration throughout the film is provided by Bruno Ganz (1941-2019), an actor known for films such as ‘Wings of Desire’ and ‘Downfall – Hitler and the End of the Third Reich’, recounting the passage of refugees through the Portuguese capital.
Daniel Blaufuks was born in Lisbon and moved to Germany as a teenager, returning in 1983.
He studied photography and began his career at the newspaper Blitz, later working for O Independente and Marie Claire, among other publications.
In 1989, he won the Portuguese Image Association/KODAK Award, and in 1996, he was among the eight finalists for the European Photography Award. The relationship between public and private, individual and collective memory has been a recurring theme in his work, which blends various artistic media.
Blaufuks primarily uses photography and video, materializing through books, installations, and films presented in exhibitions at institutions such as the Centro Arte Moderna Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon), Palazzo delle Papesse (Siena), Elga Wimmer Gallery (New York), ARCO and Photoespaña fairs (Madrid).
Matthew Herbert is a British composer, artist, producer, and writer with over three dozen albums, including the renowned ‘Bodily Functions’, the soundtrack for the 2018 Oscar-winning Best Foreign Film ‘A Fantastic Woman’, along with music for theater, musicals, TV series, and video games.
He has remixed works by several iconic artists such as Quincy Jones, Ennio Morricone, and Serge Gainsbourg, and is a long-time collaborator with Icelandic singer Björk.
