O Fumo do Fogo

Smoke of the Fire

22’ | Portugal, Ukraine | 2023 | essay documentary

There is Portugal, there is the Portuguese language and there is a Ukrainian filmmaker who learns the language and approaches the role of the potential migrant. Between languages, between images from here and those from a country at war, a voice tries to put into words the state of longing.

with Mariana Portugal Dias

director Daryna Mamaisur images Shaheen Ahmed, Daryna Mamaisur, Svitlana Vostrikova editing Daryna Mamaisur sound recording Ghada Fikri, Juliette Menthonnex additional sound Tetiana Usova sound design Anna Khvyl poster design Marina Kelleny production DocNomads

available for streaming on dafilms.com

Festivals and Awards:

2023

FIDMarseille Film Festival, France

DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Korea

Bucharest International Experimental Film, Romania

Reykjavík International Film Festival, Iceland

18th Pravo Ljudski Film Festival, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

DOKLeipzig, Germany

Festival dei Popoli, Florence, Italy

Montreal International Documentary Festival RIDM, Canada

2024

Doc Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal (Best Short Film & Best Editing Awards)

E-flux Award Shortlist, e-flux screening room, New York, USA

Visions du Réel, Nyon, Switzerland

Collective Dreaming screening, CCA Glasgow

DocAlliance Award nomination

Fronteras inútiles. Estancias de la memoria en el cine auto-referencial, Madrid, Spain

DocLisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

Ji.hlava film festival, Czech Republic

Šoblė Film Festival, Vilnius, Lithuania

2025

Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival
Wiz-Art Film Festival

Roland Barthes prompts us to ask how, under what conditions, and through which operations a discourse can detach itself from any desire to seize. Power, if conceived in its multiplicity, inhabits every fragment of life—even in the discourses born in the heat of resistance. For this reason, in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Barthes argued that the way to counter the perpetuity of power (its fascist condition) in society is to outwit it with language, to cheat it through and within language. This is precisely how Mamaisur seems to approach her work because, if one seeks the invisible within the visible of her short film, one can uncover the assembly of a plurality of heterogeneous times.

David Sebastian Rodriguez [Revista Caligari]

Starting from her learning of the Portuguese language, she invents a poignant visual alphabet, composed of various materials brilliantly combined: vibrant close-ups of the drawings from her textbooks – naive worlds of blue, yellow, and red; photos and recordings sent to her from Kyiv like tragic postcards; her own archives; and footage from her language classes. The absurd and innocent simplicity of the sentences recited in Portuguese contrasts with the possible reality of her loved ones under the bombs. From this taming of Portuguese, Daryna Mamaisur makes the opposite of a stammer. On the contrary, it is in the elemental precision of words tasted for the first time in a foreign language that their full meaning may lie. Some words resonate more than others: Zangar means "anger." Zunia means "buzz" and evokes the sound of war. In the poetic and moving puzzle that O Fumo do Fogo composes, they become like the coordinates of an exile.

Claire Lasolle [FIDMarseille]

Interview [FIDMarseille]

Expatriation, a review by David Sebastian Rodriguez [Revista Caligari, available with a subscription]

Interview [Revista Caligari, available with a subscription]