“Cru” means “rough”, “raw” or “sore”, all of which applies to this sequence of scenes by Carlos Ruiz Carmona – snapshots of the Portuguese city of Porto, collected over almost a decade. There are movie kisses and vigorously fucking bodies, trembling hands and sex for money. Communion wafers crack and teeth are knocked out. The images are anything but glamorous but highly charged: they show tense and often aggressive people. Carlos Ruiz Carmona’s Porto is a field of energy where tension keeps building and is discharged all over the place, where people are receivers or transmitters of those currents. The film seems both distant and intimate because its director, while renouncing all direct communication, is a penetrating observer. One who is most interested in the surfaces under which things are seething, ready to burst – be it in the shape of eczema, a blow or a birth.

Carolin Weidner