The New York Times by Beandrea July
A work that possesses both the whimsy and fearlessness of a student project and the technical vibrancy of a veteran’s opus.
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Portugal, France · 2021
1h 42m
Director Miguel Gomes, Maureen Fazendeiro
Starring Crista Alfaiate, Carloto Cotta, João Nunes Monteiro, Isabel Cardoso
Genre Drama
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In sun-soaked Portugal, three close friends, Crista, Carloto, and João, live in rural peace during the Covid-19 lockdown. They pass their time in a spacious farmhouse where the dog days of summer are filled with dancing, chores, disturbed sleep patterns, flirtations, and building a backyard butterfly house.
The New York Times by Beandrea July
A work that possesses both the whimsy and fearlessness of a student project and the technical vibrancy of a veteran’s opus.
Whether wholly performed or partially authentic, The Tsugua Diaries wittily evokes the volatile mood swings of lockdown — how concentrated time with the same people can yield either irritation or intensified closeness from day to day, particularly in a sticky-hot summer haze.
The Tsugua Diaries has something of a chiasmus structure, with each half of the movie, each layer of reality, and each direction of time doubling back on and rhyming with itself.
The Tsugua Diaries is something like Memento for an age of isolation and listlessness.
The New Yorker by Richard Brody
The directors, Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, rely on some tricky devices to tell the story of this film shoot—but those tricks, far from undercutting the emotional drama, intensify it. The result is the most accomplished and absorbing film about time spent in lockdown that I’ve seen.