Suzanne Daveau

Portraiture and history, testimony and geography cohere to absorbing effect in Luísa Homem’s interview-based micro-epic. The film’s titular subject, a French geographer and adventurer born in 1925, recounts her own life, covering her student years during World War II, her subsequent field research in Africa and Portugal, her loves, her family, her feminism, and her reflections on modernity. Homem strikingly weaves together interviews, archival photos, and home movies to arrive at a complex and immersive portrait of a modern woman perennially fascinated by the world around her and consumed by an insatiable hunger for knowledge.