With Earth Day on the horizon, we wanted to showcase a recent short film from Ewelina Rosińska, made in collaboration with Nuno Barroso, that looks at various regions, rocks, animals, and people in Portugal. Shot on Bolex 16mm cameras between 2018 and 2023, Unstable Rocks offers a sprawling portrait of a landscape in flux as it contends with tectonic shifts, ramping gentrification, and increased industrialization.

At the heart of Rosińska’s film is an interest in geologic time, which the quickness of contemporary life makes us oblivious to. As Rosińska stated in an interview around the time of the film’s release, “[Nuno and I] discussed the idea that everything is in motion, but the timescale of human life does not allow us to observe it; like the movement of mountains, for example.” With their gentle, eagle-eyed camerawork, the duo create a film that embodies such slowness. Rather than offer quick glances of a changing world, Unstable Rocks presents the viewer with a portrait six years in the making. Their film is full of new sights and sounds in each cut, but also aware that some things change at a much slower pace, like the wave-beaten shores of a beach or the rugged cliffs of mountaintops. 

“During the excursion we approached a kind of a mad project of a rich medical doctor in Castelo Branco, which is a park where you can find different variations of large scale stone compositions. We were there at the beginning of the construction and found a large homemade sign with a warning: PEDRAS INSTÁVEIS (en. unstable rocks). This park with its sign became for us a response to what we’ve just learned from [the scientist Dipesh] Chakrabarty, it suggests an interesting opposition of the idea of something stable and movement.” EWELINA ROSIŃSKA

As Rosińska continued to film Portugal’s varied landscapes, she came into contact with the group of artists and eco-activists of Guarda Rios, a regional collective based around the country’s riverside territories. She filmed around their different artistic and educational activities, fashioning a cinematic corollary of sorts to their ventures. Between Rosiñska’s time-expanded approach to the world and her collaboration with environmental activists, it’s clear Unstable Rocks exemplifies a deep awareness of the environment as it is now, was in the past, and could be soon if no action is taken against climate change.

Ewelina Rosińska was born in a small town in south-east Poland. She holds an MA in Art History from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, as well as a diploma from the German Film and Television Academy (dffb) in Berlin. Her films explore female perspectives and questions of identity and transnationality. They have screened at international film festivals like IFFR, CPH:DOX and docs lisboa, as well as prestigious institutions such as the Museum of the Moving Image and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Ewelina Rosińska. The quote featured above was first published in the program notes for FICUNAM 15’s edition of UMBRALES and was extremely helpful in informing our own program notes.