Rui

Young Rui lives alone on the outskirts of Lisbon, eking out a living from illegal fishing, selling his crabs door to door by the kilo. Sometimes people buy them, often not. His daily life is structured, but above all paralysed, by an addiction to drugs that prevents him from moving on – despite numerous attempts to break free and quit. Gradually, director Ruslan Fedotow – whose work as director of photography has already been presented at Visions du Réel – exposes the daily life of a struggling man, and his fight, in spite of everything, to stay in touch with his son, who is being kept from him. One evening, during the Christmas festivities, he faces a crucial choice: whether to lose himself once again to drugs and partying, or to break the vicious circle and try to reconnect with his family. By recalling his own experiences and the death of his alcoholic brother, the director uses impressionistic touches to create a moving tale that advances, like Rui, between the real and the unreal, between attempts to hang on to reality or disappear into the shadows of the night and of oneself. Following Rui means “capturing his struggle with a reality in which he cannot find his place”.
Charlotte Serrand