‘Savanna And The Mountain’: Cannes Review

Dir: Paulo Carneiro. Portugal/Uruguay. 2024. 77mins

For his follow-up to 2018’s similarly rural documentary Bostofrio, Paulo Carneiro returns to the area of Portugal where his father was born to chart the resistance to a multinational’s attempts to extract lithium in the region. The result is an unusually gentle David and Goliath tale, a winsome, slow-burning charmer whose warm heart means it can be forgiven for failing to address some of the large climate change issues that it is implicitly raising. Following its premiere in Directors’ Fortnight, this particular Mountain looks set to move to further eco-friendly festival berths.

A celebration of a community finding new ways of coming together

The early scenes paint the village of Covas do Barroso, in northern Portugal, as a place closely tied to nature and to the eternal rhythms of time. The horses being led across the mountainside are skittish, seemingly aware that change is on the way – and indeed it is, in the form of British company Savannah Resources which seeks to mine lithium from a nearby mountain as part of the move to more sustainable energy.

Fearful of the pollution of their land and the disappearance of the way of life that has been theirs for centuries – the area is a World Heritage agricultural site – the locals are incensed. A young girl is sent out to talk to some of the workers in hi-vis jackets who are arriving in ever greater numbers: as a peace offering, she sells them local cured sausage. 

If the first half of the film often feels like slow cinema, featuring stunning landscapes and sequences of often-ageing locals going about their business, the second half is relatively action-packed. Soon we become aware that we are not watching a straightforward documentary about the villagers’ protest, but that Savanna And The Mountain is being staged by the director and is itself a part of that protest, with the villagers as actors (the flat delivery by the locals of some of the scripted lines has already suggested this). 

 As the town warms to the task, the villagers become more creative, walking through the streets alongside a carriage with ’The Lithium Mafia’ painted on the side – into which a company worker is clumsily bundled. Diego Placeres’ twangy soundtrack joins stirring, 60s-style protest songs performed by local singer-songwriter Carlos Libo, while the credit fonts are lifted directly from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. For a while, the locals’ protests help to suspend the development of the lithium project but, perhaps inevitably, they are soon back again.

Largely consisting of smartly-framed, lengthy exterior shots of the village and aerial views of the surrounding area through the seasons, Duarte Domingos’ sumptuous photography feels like a homage to the natural beauty that the locals feel is under threat, and to their place in it. Space is found for the occasional striking vignette, as when the wall-shadow of a man holding a sickle looks like not only an symbolic image of agriculture, but also of the Grim Reaper.

How best to save the planet? Savanna And The Mountain is equivocal. The villagers wish to change nothing and jthat might indeed offer their community a sustainable future. But, from a less local standpoint, the professed aim of mining lithium to replace fossil fuels with electricity also seems legitimate – it all depends on how it is handled. The film’s implicit division between the ‘good’ villagers and the ‘evil’ corporation thus comes over as too simplistic, and perhaps even too good-natured. What we are left with is a celebration of a community finding new ways of coming together.