The archaeologist Margot Moreira arrives in exclusion zone called Central Depression, where the sun never stops shining.
Secção: Retrospectivas | Retrospectives
Brasil, 2027. A deeply religious woman uses her position in a notary’s office to try to prevent couples from divorcing. Whilst waiting for a divine sign in recognition of her efforts, she’s confronted with a crisis that ultimately brings her closer to God.
History is being written in the streets, but their teacher prefers Shakespearean texts.
From Spanish, querencia refers to desire, wanting, it is the place you love. Also in Brazil it is the place where cattle were raised or have the habit of grazing. It is the place where one finds their strength – a man, the bull – where one feels at home. Marcelo is a cowboy who sees his life overshadowed by a dark cloud when a violent assault occurs on the farm where he works. Sinking down, he is forced to rethink his life. But here lies also an opportunity to pursue a dream: to be a rodeo narrator. And so a new desire is drawn, a new place where one feels at home, next to his bulls, again strong and sane. Helvécio Marins weaves a narrative based on reality – his non-actors are transported to this territory and carry with them all the experience and feelings giving a bull’s strength to this film. Meanwhile the animals look firmly at us like announcing: dark times are coming to Brazil, but the strength will come and go in a wave, it will not abandon us. (M.M.)
Sônia borrowed a gun from her neighbor, to avenge her son, Joca, who was killed by Beto, who is Miro’s brother, who is Rose’s lover, who is Selma’s friend, who works with Marcos, who is Ana’s boyfriend, who wants to leave the city of Contagem and have a better life.
Bande à part (Godard’s seventh feature film) was made during the period in which the director most questioned and reinvented cinema. Film characters in a relentlessly real world or real characters in a film world? A dense and intense film, one of the great moments of modern cinema. And the film where we learned that one can run through the Louvre in a lightning foray of nine minutes and forty-three seconds. (Cinemateca Portuguesa)
Les fiancés du pont Mac Donald or (méfiez-vous des lunettes noires) is a curious “film within the film,” Cléo de 5 a 7’s burlesque segment in “silent movie style”, with Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard playing the role of two young lovers: a boy sees life in black when he wears sunglasses, he only needs to remove them to make things better. Agnès Varda said that the idea came to her by the desire to film Godard’s “big Buster Keaton eyes”, and he accepted to take off the dark glasses he wore at that time. In the structure of Cléo, it corresponds to a moment of distension, and has also been presented as an autonomous short film. (Cinemateca Portuguesa)
Ana, a Portuguese actress, has come to Rio de Janeiro to play the lead in a mysterious film about Carmen Miranda, the eccentric Portuguese-Brazilian actress and singer who put Brazil on the map for its samba and carnival culture.
With a slower pace than other Fassbinder films, Chinese Roulette is a closed-space game: a couple spends the weekend in a castle, separately, each with his (her) lover and surprisingly meet face to face. The couple’s daughter, a physically disabled pre-teen, sets in motion a cruel “truth game” all weekend. The four characters of the exchanged couples and four others cohabit the space of the castle in the time of the film, participating in the threatening environment in which the threat of Nazism hovers and the restlessness of an enigma to unveil. (Cinemateca Portuguesa)
With a stunning black and white photograph by Raoul Coutard, Vivre sa vie is a film built for Anna Karina, which shows that besides being an icon of the Nouvelle Vague, she is a fabulous actress. Very few faces would pass unhindered in comparison to Falconetti in Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc (a film that Karina’s character will see, in a sequence of Vivre sa vie), also a sign of Godard’s genius and boldness. Godard in honor of Dreyer. Karina’s close ups in front of Falconetti’s close ups. (Cinemateca Portuguesa)
Godard’s second film commercially released (given the censorship imposed on Le petit soldat), Une femme est une femme is a tribute to the American musical and a distant echo of Design for Living by Ernst Lubitsch (1932), filmed in CinemaScope and in sumptuous colors. Awarded at the Berlin Film Festival for having “shaken the rules of film comedy,” it is a film of extreme lightness and elegance, in which Anna Karina has one of her best appearances. Anna is Angela, a cabaret dancer who thinks about motherhood, while she agrees and disagrees with her husband and his friend, with whom she stages a love triangle. “Une femme” / “infamous.” (Cinemateca Portuguesa)
The Girl with the Shoes, by Ib Schmedes is Anna Karina’s first work in cinema, awarded in Cannes in 1959. (Cinemateca Portuguesa)
In the dystopian political context of 2016, Marcela uses her cell phone’s teleportation service to leave the country, but her data plan is too small.
Shot outdoors in Switzerland with amateur actors and handheld camera, Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak precedes the French New Wave: shot by Rohmer in 1951 but completed ten years later when the 16mm material was blown-up to 35mm and post-synchronization was performed. Stéphane Audran and Anna Karina interpret the voices of the two girls. A young Jean-Luc Godard appears, without glasses. A little love drama of a youthful winter. (Cinemateca Portuguesa)
Godard’s most famous film, “a sublime beauty” in the words of Louis Aragon, continues to enthuse the new generations who discover it. Pierrot and Marianne suddenly leave Paris and drive through the roads of France, “living dangerously to the end.” They love and kill (themselves), but mainly they reject civilization as the petty bourgeoisie conceives it, living the moment. Raoul Coutard’s color cinematography is a true compendium of the many aesthetic trends of the sixties. And it is here that Godard films Fuller affirming that “cinema is like a battlefield. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In a word: emotion.” (Cinemateca Portuguesa)
Adapted from the novels The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, Justine is considered a minor George Cukor work, partly due to the incidents that surrounded the production. After the former director of the project (Joseph Strick) quit, Cukor was assigned the “save this film” mission, accepting Fox’s request five years after the glorious My Fair Lady. Recreating the romanesque and political plot in the Alexandria of the thirties, Justine has some remarkable moments like the Carnival sequence. Anouk Aimée is Justine. Anna Karina (Melissa), saw in the film the possibility of being directed by Cukor, one of the masters she admired. (Cinemateca Portuguesa)
Tayra was the director’s best friend while growing up on a beach in the northeast of Brazil. The sea breeze brings back memories.