Portuguese film Alma Viva, winner of the Audience Award at the Network of Festivals in the Adriatic Region (awarded on the 28th Auteur Film Festival in Belgrade), premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as part of the Critic's Week, is a debut feature film directed by Kristela Alveš Meire.

This film, whose title is not (incorrectly) translated as it hides and hints at the tone, atmosphere, action, and to some extent even the resolution of the whole story, is a combination of traditional and modern elements. This is evident in the story as well as in set design, united in a form akin to something between a fairy tale and a realistic historical record in the form of oral lore told by a campfire. The latter is recounted from the viewpoint of Salome, who can be viewed both as the narrator and as a heroine in a fairy tale. The title of the film, liberally translated, would mean “The Soul That (Continues) to Live.” This soul that lives represents both the conceptual and the formal framework of the film, since the first frame is already dedicated to the ritual of summoning the souls of the dead, which we observe through the eyes of Salome while her grandmother performs it. The same grandmother, through the very same Salome, takes on a new existence after death, in the form of a spirit. 

In addition to visualizing the title, the first scene also sets the atmosphere for the whole story: darkness in which the only source of light is the ghostly flicker of candle flames that the director uses as a prop, while the grandmother uses them for the prayer which summons the dead. The director again relies on such diegetic efficiency for sound in the film. The subject of the scene, in this case the song/prayer, becomes the soundtrack. She repeats the same process  in several places throughout the film, so at one point the sound of local musicians from the villages which Salome passes by serves as a soundtrack for the film. 

This use of narrative-based sound represents a non-standard form of mini demolition of the fourth wall, as it serves to engage the viewer but also imposes itself as a transition from the narrative to the real world, the world of viewers, and vice versa. This transition is a leitmotif that stands out as perhaps the most important technical, as well as substantive part of this film. The way in which the director creates a parallel between the village (that exudes tradition, religion and folklore mysticism) and the city (primarily hinted at and presented through a different language and the characters whose arrival to the village causes anxiety) merges into a magical realism that never completely crosses into the world of fiction; its main tool is the little Salome, located on the margins of the village and the city. The director pulls the reins of the paranormal precisely, maintaining it on screen for only as long as it takes to create tension and surprise the viewer, never crossing the line of completely inexplicable. 

She uses the same precision in other scenes in the film, which, although at first they seem frightening or irrational, simultaneously represent a part of (rural) daily life. Thus in the service of tense atmosphere there is the dead body of the grandmother, lying in coffin for days while the plot and the film itself continue to unfold around it quite normally, the passers-by with scary masks celebrating a local festival, or a close-up of the removal of entrails from a fish that will later serve as a weapon.

The culmination of this technique of blending elements of the natural and the supernatural to surprise and create an atmosphere is perhaps best reflected and apparent in the scene in which little Salome sits in a lively chicken coop, but in the very next scene she wakes up blood stained, surrounded by the chickens all dead. The director makes the transition from the first to the second scene in an abrupt cut, that stops for a moment in complete blackness and puts the viewer in the same state of trance as Salome herself, and awakens him from it. As a deliberate non-answer to all the questions raised in the film, and as a deliberate contribution to the already sufficiently creepy atmosphere that peaks at this point, the director burns the village where all this chaos-question has broken out, burning the film and the story along with it and thereby leaving it never fully explained.