In a long, wide shot, we see machines at work: digging and extracting sand incessantly. Within this shot, human beings are tiny – small organisms within a huge, deformed body. In "Coup de Grace" Salomé Lamas turns her cinema upside down: although the film bears the marks of an extremely harsh reality (labour, housing, survival), here fiction invades documentary, seizes it, to become intense and surreal, as if Lamas were now a filmmaker of fantasy perverting her characters in order to play with them. But in this film the characters seem to have no salvation, they are only "sand getting into the works". From that prison in which humans place themselves (again work, again houses and what we need in them), only liberation is suggested – a visually impressive one in the shots of birds that flutter in a flock. And so Salomé Lamas is back to Vila do Conde, where she has presented several works as different as "The Community" in 2012, about holidaymakers in camping parks, or "The Tower", in 2015, an experimental film in which forest and man seem to compete for the lead role. (DR)