BAAN
PORTUGAL

Director: Leonor Teles
Cast: Carolina Miragaia, Meghna Lall, Filipa Falcão
Genre: Friendship, Romance, Drama, Self-Discovery
100 minutes: Portuguese, English with English subtitles – 2023
Rating: 13 L P
‘Sometimes we need to run away to come back’.
Baan (Thai for home) reimagines the world of a young architect coming to terms with her own aloneness through a quasi-magical shift between Lisbon and Bangkok. Time, space and emotions quietly implode; past, present or perhaps future intertwine in a story that begins when L meets the elusive K. It’s a serendipitous encounter that sets off a new emotional journey of self-discovery.
The metaphoric wandering in Baan speaks to a restless seeking spirit inherent in youth today, but is also evident in the pensive roaming through gorgeously shot cityscapes that won the film Best Cinematography award at the Coimbra Caminhos Film Festival. There is artful deployment of jump cuts, musical transitions, and an experimental narrative to challenge a connecting of the dots. As a multi-talented writer/ cinematographer / director Leonor Teles has marked out a distinctive niche for herself as one of Portugal’s brightest young filmmakers emerging out of Portugal today.
BAAN is a chronicle of a tumultuous romance stretching across weeks and time zones, but it’s also and most significantly a snapshot of 21st-century restlessness; a canvas for a whole generation.
Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage
BAAN shows the world through the eyes of a woman first in the blossoming of her love, and then in the struggle of solitude. In the end, the lesson is endurance.
Savina Petkova, Tomás Guarnaccia, Variety
The rootlessness of globalized youth searching for some place to call “home”.
Jay Weissberg, The Film Verdict
Undercutting Teles’s electrifying visual language and stylish cinematography is a subtle political urgency.
William Stottor, Loudandclear