18 Holes to Paradise (18 Buracos para o Paraíso) had its world première at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, 13 Nov 2025
The opening credits of João Nuno Pinto’s 18 Holes to Paradise (18 Buracos para o Paraíso) play over a long series of shots showing Francisca (Margarida Marinho) driving her car along a dusty dirt road in Alentejo in south-central Portugal. The sequence is uneventful, even dull – until there is a loud, unexpected thud, and Francisca’s carefree journey is brought to a sudden, alarming stop. When we next see her, she has managed to get back with the car to her home, the large, beautiful country estate of Lagariça, and as she staggers about looking dazed and traumatised, her ageing long-term housekeeper Alma (Lluísa Ortigoso) and Alma’s adult daughter Susana (Rita Cabaço) come over to find a duck bloodily embedded in the windscreen of the vehicle. This prologue bears witness to how, on life’s rocky road, even the most seemingly cocooned bourgeois life can come at any time into violent collision with nature – although it is the proletariat that is typically left to face the consequences and to clean up the ensuing mess.
Although the title of 18 Holes to Paradise might suggest otherwise, this is not a film about golf. Rather it concerns the social and ecological conditions that underlie such a privileged pastime. For Francisca’s sister Catarina aka ‘Kiki’ (Beatriz Batarda) and brother Lourenço aka Lori (Jorge Andrade) have come to Lagariça with their various children in tow to discuss the selling off of the family property and the division of the spoils – and there is speculation that an interested party from abroad may want to turn the estate into a golf course.
Artist Francisca is against the sale, which would entail losing both her home and the seat of her childhood memories, but Kiki and Lori, who share those memories but live in Lisbon, are keen for the sale to take place, and to cash in before the already somewhat dilapidated, expensive-to-maintain property becomes unsellable in a region ever more damaged by drought. Francisca’s staff and neighbours, of course, know that such sales only contribute to environmental damage in the region, as outsiders without local knowledge either rapidly deplete the soil with inappropriate crops, or build water-guzzling amusements for outside élites who contribute little to the community.
18 Holes to Paradise is a domestic saga told from three occasionally overlapping points of view (Francisca’s, Kiki’s and Susana’s) which together paint a bigger, more panoramic picture of this affluent family and its many connections to its environment, even as it expressly looks forward to the climate change that will affect all our lives. The film instantiates this dramatically in a raging wildfire that gets ever closer to the property, trapping the whole community – rich and poor – together, if not on equal terms. Written by Fernanda Polacow, Pinto’s film may show all of these siblings referring sentimentally to ageing, Alzheimer’s-afflicted Alma – who raised them – as ‘family’, but despite her increasingly addled state of mind, Alma understands how she has been exploited across the generations, even as Susana’s ever more assertive demands that Alma get the retirement she is owed fall on repeatedly deaf ears.
In the end Lagariça is a microcosm of the crumbling, beleaguered world that the monied classes have made, and that the working class must equally endure. Indeed its final, panicky scenes unfold in slow-motion in front of a mural depicting a long history of colonial rapine. 18 Holes to Paradise is an allegory of a national and indeed global ecosystem in rapid decline, where it may be too late for class conflict, blind optimism, racist scapegoating or selfish indifference to stop what has been set in motion, as inevitable and destructive as a low-flying duck to a car’s windshield. The film’s scale may be reduced to the upstairs-downstairs clashes of an entitled clan and those who serve them, but ultimately this is a story of the quiet apocalypse coming to us all.
strap: Property is theft: João Nuno Pinto’s family saga shows a microcosm of a world in flames, obliviously lit and fanned by monied élites
© Anton Bitel
