On 11 September 1979, a fifteen-year-old Portuguese boy boarded a plane leaving Lisbon, armed with a scholarship, a clandestine camera, and the fervent blessing of his militant communist parents. His destination was Astrakhan – a port city on the northwestern edge of the Caspian Sea, deep in the Soviet interior. He was to study fishing techniques for one year. He returned home early, bearing psychological scars he would keep locked away for four decades. The boy’s name was Martim Santa Rita, and the story he never told is the subject of Catarina Mourão’s Astrakan 79, a hybrid documentary that had its world premiere at Visions du Réel in Nyon, Switzerland, in March 2023, and reached UK audiences via ICA Films in September 2024.
The Unmaking of a Communist Dream
To understand why a fifteen-year-old would leave post-revolutionary Portugal for the Soviet Union in 1979, one must understand the peculiar ideological climate of the time. Portugal was only five years removed from the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, the military coup that ended nearly half a century of the Salazar-Caetano dictatorship. In the tumultuous years that followed – the so-called PREC, or Processo Revolucionário Em Curso – the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) enjoyed enormous influence. Its leaders had spent decades underground, enduring imprisonment and exile, and the revolution catapulted them to political prominence virtually overnight. For a generation of Portuguese leftists, the Soviet Union remained the lodestar, the society that supposedly fulfilled every socialist ideal. As Mourão explains in the film’s promotional materials, Martim’s parents “were militants of the Communist Party and saw the Soviet Union as an ideal to aspire to.”
The trigger for Martim’s decision was a copy of Soviet Life, the glossy Soviet answer to Life magazine, to which his father subscribed. Flipping through its pages, the teenager dreamed of helping to build a new society. He applied for and received a scholarship to study fishing techniques at the university in Astrakhan. His parents, believing the USSR was safe and the experience beneficial, sanctioned the trip.
What Martim found was something else entirely. He lied about his age to Soviet officials, claiming to be eighteen. He spent a three-day train journey crossing the Volga delta, meeting African and Latin American students along the way. He enrolled in his course, began learning Russian, and took nightly solace in Beatles cassettes he had smuggled from home. Then things unravelled. He fell deeply in love – several times, as the film’s notes describe it – dropped out of his studies, slept on park benches, sold his records and blue jeans, and became what the Portuguese term clandestino: a person living outside the system’s sight. He returned to Portugal before his year was up, carrying postcards, photographs taken with his clandestine camera, and a sense of failure and shame that would calcify into a family taboo lasting more than forty years.
Mourão’s Architecture of Memory
Catarina Mourão is not a filmmaker who stumbles into other people’s secrets. She goes looking for them. A graduate of Bristol University (MA in Film and Television) and the University of Edinburgh (PhD in Film), Mourão founded AporDoc, the Portuguese Documentary Association, in 1998, and co-established the independent production company Laranja Azul with Catarina Alves Costa in 2000. Her research interests – creative documentary, memory, dream, archives, and autobiography – have defined a career built on excavating what families bury.
Her 2015 feature A Toca do Lobo (The Wolf’s Lair) was her PhD film, a journey through the secrets of her own family during the Salazar dictatorship, centred on her grandfather, the writer Tomaz de Figueiredo. That film premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, won the audience award at IndieLisboa, and toured extensively. It established Mourão’s method: start with the personal archive – photographs, letters, home movies – and let the contradictions and omissions within those documents become the narrative engine.
With Astrakan 79, Mourão applies this method to someone else’s family. She knew Martim through personal connections – “he is the brother of the husband of my sister,” she told Geoffrey Macnab of Business Doc Europe in April 2023. She had heard vague accounts of his time in the USSR but not the full story. The project originated during the making of The Wolf’s Lair, when Mourão realised that the revolutionary process itself had generated its own taboos: “During the process of making this earlier film which is about the dictatorship and family taboos, I realised after the revolution that there were other taboos connected with the revolutionary process,” she told Macnab. She had initially planned to make a film about her communist uncle’s experiences as a political prisoner, but the Covid-19 pandemic made that project too difficult to pursue. She turned to Martim’s story instead.
Two Martims, One Confession
Astrakan 79 is classified as a hybrid film – part documentary, part fiction. In the present-day sequences, the fifty-eight-year-old Martim sits in a Lisbon apartment, its pale blue corridors smudged with white paint, and talks to his adult son, Mateus M. Santa Rita, for the first time about the Soviet Union. Alongside these confessional scenes, Mourão stages poetic re-enactments of the teenage Martim’s journey, performed by the subject’s nephew – also named Mateus M. Santa Rita – who serves as a ghostly double of the fifteen-year-old protagonist.
Mourão worked with a cache of primary materials: postcards the young Martim sent to his parents, photographs taken during his time in the USSR, and the broader family archive. These documents anchor the re-enactments, giving them a specificity that pure fiction would lack. The Visions du Réel catalogue describes: “With a handful of photos and postcards sent to his family at the time, a young actor playing his ghostly twin in a few scenes, and a long confessional conversation filmed in a decrepit apartment that has been transformed into a site of remembrance, the Portuguese filmmaker captures with vibrant precision the moment in which a middle-aged man decides to relate a formative experience from his youth.”
Cinematography is by Paulo Menezes, with editing by Pedro Mateus Duarte. The film runs to sixty-three or sixty-four minutes and is produced by Terratreme Filmes and Laranja Azul, with sales handled by Portugal Film.
The Father-Son Conversation
The beating heart of Astrakan 79 is not the historical recreation but the dialogue between Martim and his son. Phuong Le, reviewing the film for The Guardian in September 2024, identified this as the film’s emotional centre: “In addition to confronting the past, Mourão’s film also makes possible an intergenerational dialogue between Martim and his son, the young musician seen in the beginning; he also harbours his own secrets. Emerging from their conversation are sparks of understanding and compassion, which constitute the emotional beating heart of the film.”
This intergenerational dimension elevates Astrakan 79 beyond mere reminiscence. The conversation between father and son surfaces questions about how ideological conviction passes – or fails to pass – between generations, and how the suppression of emotion and experience shapes family dynamics across decades. As the ethnocineca festival catalogue notes: “Embedded in a politically charged environment, Astrakan 79 is dedicated to the momentum between father and son on the threshold of adulthood and explores how values change in the course of a lifetime.”
Mourão has spoken about the film’s engagement with masculinity. “Martim the son has this female side but also Martim the father is talking about his emotions and how it is still not welcome for a man to cry,” she told Business Doc Europe. She regards the documentary partly as a love story: “It’s about choices you make and the encounters you have in your life that form you.”
Le, however, found the re-enactment sequences less successful than the present-day conversations: “In contrast to these riveting moments, the re-enactments of Martim’s time in Astrakhan feel quite distracting and even unnecessary. Instead of these dramatised interludes, Martim’s experience, as well as his moving rapport with his son, could have been enough to carry the film’s various ruminations.”
A Festival Life
Astrakan 79 has had an extensive festival career since its world premiere at Visions du Réel in March 2023. At IndieLisboa it won Best Director in a Portuguese Feature Film. At MDOC in Melgaço, it received the Jean Loup Passek Award for Best Portuguese Documentary. The film was subsequently screened at FIDBA in Buenos Aires, MIDBO in Bogotá, DjarFogo in Cape Verde, Porto/Post/Doc, the Macao International Documentary Film Festival, DocPoint Helsinki, ethnocineca in Vienna, and others. In 2025, it received an Honourable Mention at FID:Rio.
The UK premiere came in September 2024, when ICA Films released the film on a week-long run at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, as part of a season of contemporary Portuguese cinema in partnership with Terratreme.
Why Astrakan 79 Matters Now
The film arrives at a moment when documentary cinema’s capacity to excavate personal and political memory feels particularly urgent – a capacity explored in recent Creativitys coverage of films as varied as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries. Portugal’s revolutionary period remains a contested space – the PCP’s strong Moscow orientation during the 1970s placed it at odds with the Eurocommunist parties of France, Italy, and Spain, who increasingly distanced themselves from the Soviet system. For a Portuguese teenager in 1979, arriving in the USSR after the Carnation Revolution, the collision between communist idealism and Soviet reality was not an abstraction but a lived rupture.
Mourão’s achievement in Astrakan 79 is to render that rupture as intimate drama rather than political tract. The film does not sensationalise or simplify. It listens. The postcards, the photographs, the apartment with its ocean-coloured walls, the obboe played by a young musician at the film’s opening – all of these elements create a texture of memory that is at once specific to one Portuguese family and universal in its resonance.
That Mourão chose not to travel to Russia to film – “with the war in Ukraine, that wasn’t going to be possible,” she told Macnab, adding, “And I thought it was much more interesting to keep this kind of fantasy of this time” – is itself a statement about the relationship between memory and place. The Soviet Union that Martim visited no longer exists. What remains is the story he tells his son, and the camera that captures the moment of its release.
For those interested in the documentary form’s capacity to navigate between past and present, Astrakan 79 sits alongside recent work examining how personal archives illuminate collective history. The film is a reminder that the most consequential political stories are often the ones whispered across kitchen tables, not shouted from podiums.
