Children play in a spring-like landscape. Together they follow paths through the countryside, they discover abandoned houses that they use to play hide-and-seek, they eat blackberries that blackberry bushes leave at their mercy. But the joviality of these children contrasts with men and women who tell stories of a tough past and of a future they imagined would be different. The marks on their bodies, symbolized by the hands of a very old woman, are wrinkled, marked by a time that was harsh and long. Even the working tools – hoes thrown in the middle of the ground – are worn out and useless. In "Barbs, Wasteland" Marta Mateus invents a kind of time without time, a fable of ancestral Portugal in a poetry of the landscape and of men that crosses the worlds of António Reis and Pedro Costa. This filmmaker makes a promising debut with her first short film, which includes a cast of young children who seem to have come out of classics like "Trás-os-Montes" (António Reis, 1977) or "The Blood" (Pedro Costa, 1989) and who question us straightforwardly through the strength of their gaze and their bodily determination. "Barbs, Wasteland" is a film in a limit-space about a past and a future in debate. (DR)