Amidst the mechanical sound that harks back to film projection, some musical notes, and whispers that accentuate the enigmatic nature of the images in permanent succession, we plunge into a world populated by nebulous and hardly decipherable shapes, resembling fragments of landscapes, faces, or animal shapes that we keep trying to discern like fleeting clouds. Symmetrically mirrored, Sandro Aguilar’s strange figures evoke phantasmagorias of yore, or the renewed amazement provided by the Cinema experience. The opacity extends to the title itself, “The Detection of Faint Companions”, suggesting a thorough research on bodies and beings, microscopically observed. In these images, Sandro Aguilar seems to examine fragments of the world in which he moves, without pausing on each of them for more than a split second. This indissoluble mystery brings the Portuguese filmmaker back to Curtas Vila do Conde, where his work has been screened and awarded over the last two decades. (RaM)