Uprise

Hospitals can be highly emotional places - happiness, sadness, loneliness, isolation are feelings we endure when we lose a special someone, it's almost like the place we inhabit is left empty, all that remains are memories.

Uprise is a daring, strange film from writer/director Sandro Aguilar, saturated with lingering shots of empty spaces and silence. For at least the first half of the movie nothing really happens and the film sets an awkward tone and downbeat mood. Its slow build-up lacks substance and feels like an overlong short film.

The story centers on Rui (António Pedroso), a man who frequents a hospital to visit his dying father. While there, he meets an unnamed pregnant woman (Isabel Abreu); a survivor of a car crash which killed her lover, and from their meeting begins our journey.

It has no proper narrative, structure or logic, which I guess was the director's whole point - to ask you to suspend belief or maybe not?

Film festivals are a phenomenal way of putting your film on the map but a film must hold the audience's attention for its running time. The cinematography - beautiful in a washed out way - deserves praise and there was an interesting choice of sounds used, but, boy, was I bored?

Press notes have cited this film as haunting. Well let's just say this, if this film was a ghost I would look to get an exorcism quickly!

Not since In The City of Sylvia have I ever wished for time back in my life, this cinematic experience was in no way liberating. I have read that the director's early work often dealt with loneliness and a lack of communication, my advice to him is to start talking to people and find a tale worth telling. The lesson learned here is story is everything.