Sarapanta- Chasing the Northern Lights, Cristiano Saturno, 2018, PT/CA/US, 44’ – Porto/Post/Doc – Special Sessions – Auditório planetariodoporto ,10pm, Porto, 27.11.2018. The film will be shown again Sunday 2, 5pm at Passos Manuel, Porto.

words: Raquel Pinheiro

What a wonder to watch Sarapanta reclined on a chair in Porto’s Planetarium, staring at the sky.

Sarapanta is the debut film of novel Portuguese director Cristiano Saturno. Criatiano currently lives in Canada, but spend 44 days in Alaska hunting Aurora Borealis.

There are no technical or scientific explanations about The Aurora Borealis in Sarapanta. The low budget, almost totally self-made film aim is to show us, drag us in would be more precise, into the poetry, dream, magic and astonishment of the extraordinary Northern Lights. And it manages it with flying colours.

In Alaska Criatiano meet several villagers as well as fellow Aurora Borealis chasers, like Jean-Christian Dupré a Frenchman who become his travel and waiting companion for many nights and miles.

Waiting is an essential part of hunting The Northern Lights. In grand white wilderness patience is not only a virtue, but a necessity. The Aurora Borealis is fickle. It may show, it may not – there is a natural phenomenon involved, but let’s leave it to National Geographic.

Anyone who has ever dreamed with the Great North will be delighted by Sarapanta’s simpleness, heart, tenderness, frost landscapes and beautiful dancing greenish lights. And with the beautiful, tiny wood house with windows lit in red, orange and green.  

And, of course, there are the Lights. Those unique Lights. The only reason Sarapanta exists. They are amazing. Seen in a semi-dome (the film is not made for full-dome) in the Planetarium makes the experience almost real. One feels inside the movie, and can almost touch the shinning, passing, dancing Aurora Borealis.

More than once, someone mentions that The Aurora Borealis is like a Picasso painted in the sky. To me, it is more like Van Gogh or Pollock. But, the image is clear, it is like a marvellous painting. A masterpiece.

Sarapanta also offers a view into the life of both the villagers who adore The Aurora Borealis and the Aurora hunters. For the hunters, life is harder. Especially if they come from a tiny, Southern European country and have to adjust to the wideness, the challanges of being surrounded by snow and ice, but also the fun of it. It seems very, very cool to go outside, pick a chunk of ice with a pan, boil it on the stove and wash the dishes with the liquid result.

  

Hunting The Aurora also involves sleepless nights, wandering around using a balaclava with a torch attached to it, frustration, almost reaching insanity for lack of sleep and isolation and knowing that YouTube is not the solution to life’s magic. Or problems. Get out there and go find the path.

Sarapanta was such a smash hit – a sold out room and people wanting to buy long gone tickets - that it got an extra session in the festival.

Its only downside? Dear Cristiano, the sky is not sad in Portugal. It is magnificent. At least for a stargazer like myself.