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Susana de Sousa Dias's remarkable, hypnotic film is composed of photographs taken upon the arrest of political prisoners during the forty-eight years of the Portuguese dictatorial regime. As the prisoners stare out at us, we hear their testimony, recorded in the present, reflecting on their time in prison. “The film tries to expand the duration of that fraction of a second in which the picture was taken, and in which the prisoners opposed their oppressors, face to face,” Dias explains. In this expanded moment, the image is transfigured, and we are invited to contemplate what a photograph reveals and what it conceals.

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