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Obscure Light opens in silence with a black frame. A preface in white letters conveys the historical context of Portuguese fascism (1926-1974), the horrific results of Salazar’s dictatorship (1932-1970), including the long term incarceration of generations of ‘Communists’, and the transnational trauma of the colonial war (1961-1974). Similar to the previous two film, Still Life (Natureza Morta. Visages d’une Dictature, 2005) and 48 (2010), Obscure Light (2017) involves the viewer in a material, critical and poetic enactment of rare archival images and fragments of oral history to invoke a complex time period that is painfully present and therefore rarely addressed in public life. This time, de Sousa Dias closes in on the history of a single Portuguese family and the memories of three siblings. The childhood of Isabel, Rui, and Álvaro Pato was marked by the longing for their absent parents and the ever present threat of the PIDE/DGS.

In cliose dialogue with Susana De Sousa Dias' film Obscure Light, this short reflection highlights the possibilities of experiemental documentary to provide an allegory of memory and forgetting; an audiovisual historiography that works against the notion of an enclosed narrative to propose film as a vector for memorywork. Ideally, these are artistic projects that encourage public recognition of contested histories and shared experiences that call for alternative strategies of telling and of bridging between the present and the past.