Por Este Rio Acima (Up This River)

Agnes Meng

synopsis

Year

university

Up This River is a documentary project on northern Portuguese folklore and the river ecosystem in an immersive media art installation.

Rivers in northern Portugal have nurtured a distinct rural community with a vibrant oral tradition of recounting folklore and tales about creatures such as lost souls, enchanted “Mouras”, witches, devils, and werewolves. The project, titled “Por Este Rio Acima” (Up This River), is a combination of creative documentary on the topic of ethnography and intangible cultural heritage, and immersive media art installation. The project contains footage filmed from 2017 to 2025, set along eight rivers in the Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro region of Portugal, and features interviews with local inhabitants who possess knowledge of the oral tradition. With its cinematic visuals of eerie yet fantastical landscapes, the project seeks to unite the natural and imaginative realms, emphasising the importance of the ecosystem and its influence on human legacies. For its showcase in the future, Agnes Meng is creating box-shaped exhibition space with surrounding projections, whereas the current display is in VR.

Agnes Meng (China, 1991) is a documentary filmmaker and PhD student in Media Arts at Lusófona University. She graduated from the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University in China and the “Docnomads” Erasmus Joint Master’s programme, which involved studying at Universidade Lusófona in Lisbon, the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest, and LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. Agnes has a background in filmmaking, journalism, and ethnography. She worked in several cultural anthropology projects as a research assistant in southwest China and the Tibetan region. She is currently working on her PhD thesis project, which focuses on combining immersive media art installation and intangible cultural heritage, particularly folklore, in the Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro region of Portugal.