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Presenting Pedro Costa

Auckland Film Society presents the Fontaínhas Trilogy, three astonishing, ground-breaking films by Pedro Costa, screening from Monday 30 May.

“Acclaimed in Artforum, Cahiers du cinéma, Film Comment, and Cinema Scope, the Portuguese director Pedro Costa is possibly the most intriguing, relevant filmmaker at work today, captivating viewers with his spare, austere aesthetic, willful ambiguity, and combination of documentary, avant-garde, and fiction. While his slow-burn, trancelike style is wholly his own, Costa’s earthy portraits of the immigrant and marginalized communities of Lisbon’s slums have emerged from a recognizable, classic narrative background of Ford, Lang, Ozu, and Chaplin, touched with the more modernist palette of Straub-Huillet and Béla Tarr.

Born in Lisbon in 1959, the former rock guitarist Costa entered the then nascent Lisbon Film School in 1977, existing on a steady diet of cinema classics and contemporary criticism that were soon channeled into his astounding debut film, The Blood. His later features, especially his Fontaínhas neighborhood trilogy, abandoned the hectic cineaste’s dazzle of The Blood for a nuanced, intimate, rigorous aesthetic of observation and poetic interludes, marked by Vermeer-like domestic tableaux and a compassionate attention to his dispossessed, forgotten characters. Costa’s method, shooting over extended periods and working with non-actors ‘playing’ fictional versions of themselves, adds an intimacy unprecedented in either fiction or documentary.

‘Few movies,’ wrote Dennis Lim in the New York Times, ‘are as concretely rooted in physical reality or as profoundly attentive to their social context as Mr Costa’s. Staking out a radical middle between documentary and fiction, he has invented a heroic and quite literal form of arte povera, a monumental cinema of humble means.’” – Pacific Film Archive

Pedro Costa’s work has been virtually unseen in this country. The documentary Ne change rien is his only film to have screened here, showing at the 2010 New Zealand International Film Festival.

Auckland Film Society will screen the Fontaínhas Trilogy on 35mm prints, starting with Bones on 30 May, 6.30pm at the Academy Cinema. Films are in Portuguese with English subtitles.

People can see all three films in Pedro Costa’s Fontaínhas Trilogy for just $30, by purchasing a 3-film card membership, on sale at the AFS desk in the Academy Cinema foyer one hour before Auckland Film Society screenings.

Find full details of Auckland Film Society and how to join at www.aucklandfilmsociety.org.nz

Find full details of Pedro Costa’s Fontaínhas Trilogy at

http://www.nzfilmsociety.org.nz/pedro.htm