Shrooms

26th TIDF: Greek Premiere

In the quiet psychedelia of Jorge Jácome’s Shrooms, the filmmaker’s invocation of an altered mental state eschews the cartoonishly trippy in lieu of a heightened grasp of looking and listening. Moving in sequence from a hushed forest forage for the Psilocybin-laced fungi, their sorting and delivery via carrier pigeons and eventual ingestion by Lisbon locals, each passage is accompanied by perfectly intimate and sensitive voiceovers, with the magic of the natural world accentuated by cinematographer Marta Simões’ beguiling in-camera effects: refracted light, jump cuts, reflections and single-frame exposures. (Jesse Cumming)