News

Victor Erice’s “Close Your Eyes” won best film at the 17th edition of Leffest Lisboa Film Festival, which announced awards Saturday night.

Marking Erice’s first feature film since his 1992 docudrama “The Quince Tree Sun” and garnering almost universal positive reviews – Variety called it “an aching ode to film, time and memory” – following its world premiere at Cannes, “Close Your Eyes” has screened at Toronto, Busan, BFI London and New York.

During Leffest, in a session moderated by Paulo Branco, 83-year old Erice took part in a conversation with preeminent 64-year old Portuguese helmer, Pedro Costa, whose short “The Daughters of Fire,” was a Cannes Special Screening and also had its Portuguese premiere at the fest.

Erice remarked during the event, one fest highlight, that both he and Costa are working in the shadow of two great filmmakers – “Don Luis Buñuel” and “Don Manoel de Oliveira” – and he added...

This year’s Berlinale’s Forum includes the world premiere of Rita Azevedo Gomes’ latest feature film, “The Kegelstatt Trio,” adapted from the 1987 stage play, written by the late French helmer, Éric Rohmer.

The privately-funded Portuguese/Spanish co-production was shot during the lockdown, produced by Gomes and Gonzalo García Pelayo. It received post-production completion finance from the Portuguese Film and Audiovisual Institute (Ica).

Rohmer wrote “Le Trio en mi bémol,” inspired by Mozart’s composition of that name, while writing his 1989 pic, “Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle.”

The story revolves around a series of encounters between two former lovers who talk about what led them to drift apart, including the importance of music in cementing their relationship. Whereas the man views classical music as the supreme art form, able to move the mind and body at the profoundest level, the woman sees it as being a primarily intellectual attraction.

Mubi's retrospective Out of this World: The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes is showing July – September, 2020.Above: The Portuguese WomanIt's staggering how complete the cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes is already in her first film, a feature no less: O Som da Terra a Tremer (1990) is an explosion of feeling and thought and invention carried by the profoundest of knowledge about cinema and the arts. Thus, it is most lamentable that it took another two decades plus for her to be recognized by international film culture at its most general level, with A Woman’s Revenge (2012), a work refined and lean, almost minimalist, très Portuguese à la Oliveira, thus similar to other films, other auteurs from Europe's western-most nation—and therefore welcome with open arms at all the places usually deemed right.While one can easily say that in the end it all worked out, one has to immediately...

Moviegoing Memories is a series of short interviews with filmmakers about going to the movies. Pedro Costa's Vitalina Varela is Mubi Go's Film of the Week of March 6th, 2020.Notebook: How would you describe your movie in the least amount of words?Pedro Costa: A Woman’s Story.Notebook: Where and what is your favorite movie theater? Why is it your favorite?Costa: Cinema Império, Lisbon, today a Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.Notebook: What is the most memorable movie screening of your life? Why is it memorable?Costa: All the screenings of the programs Cinema Americano dos anos 30, 40, 50, organised by João Bénard da Costa at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, between 1977 and 1980. Because I was watching those unforgettable films for the first time.Notebook: If you could choose one classic film to watch on the big screen, what would it be and why?Costa: Enchanted...

A Portuguese Woman“It doesn’t really matter where things come from. What matters is picking things up again, mess them up, try to push them forward in a different way. All of us do it, we’ve all been doing it all through time, and things haven’t really changed that much since Greece. What we can try is to do something that seems to be new, or that is shown in a whole different way—even if not necessarily intentionally.”In a way, that’s what Rita Azevedo Gomes has been doing through her career as a filmmaker. A career, avowedly, somewhat confidential—her latest fiction, The Portuguese Woman, is only her 9th film since her 1990 debut O Som da Terra a Tremer—but one that has been quietly snowballing since 2012’s The Revenge of a Woman, to her own surprise, became a firm festival favorite. Her 2016 poetic...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.Trailer for Yuen Woo-ping's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon SequelBest known as an action coordinator, Yuen Woo-ping also has an extensive and often very good career as a director. Having previously choreographed the martial arts of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he has been bumped up to the director's chair for the film's sequel, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny.The Coen Brothers' Hail Caesar! Opens Berlinale 2016The Coens' much-anticipated Hollywood kidnapping caper will open the Berlin International Film Festival next February.70mm, The Hateful Eight and The Weinstein CompanyDeadline Hollywood has a fascinating article on just what exactly The Weinstein Company did to make sure Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight could screen around the Us in 70mm. Among many interesting factoids is the note that The Weinstein...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.Trailer for Yuen Woo-ping's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon SequelBest known as an action coordinator, Yuen Woo-ping also has an extensive and often very good career as a director. Having previously choreographed the martial arts of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he has been bumped up to the director's chair for the film's sequel, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny.The Coen Brothers' Hail Caesar! Opens Berlinale 2016The Coens' much-anticipated Hollywood kidnapping caper will open the Berlin International Film Festival next February.70mm, The Hateful Eight and The Weinstein CompanyDeadline Hollywood has a fascinating article on just what exactly The Weinstein Company did to make sure Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight could screen around the Us in 70mm. Among many interesting factoids is the note that The Weinstein...

‘Les Loups’ is the first great Quebec film of 2015

The dark unforgiving waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the mouth of the St. Lawrence river provide the backdrop to Les Loups, a beautifully crafted melodrama. Set in a small island Quebec town during the spring thaw, a stranger arrives during the height of the controversial seal hunts. Vibrant and mysterious, many suspect that Elie, the young woman from Montreal, is not who she says and is likely a reporter or an activist bent on portraying the townsfolk in a bad light… read the full article.

‘The Phantom Menace’ and the goodness of Star Wars nostalgia

A long time ago…in 1999, the pop culture zeitgeist was caught in a Star Wars maelstrom. Writer-director George Lucas and his crack creative team had gone back to the well that made space opera cinema what it is known and appreciated as today by producing...

João Bénard da Costa—Others will Love the Things I Loved

Directed by Manuel Mozos

Portugal, 2014

João Bénard da Costa (1935-2009) was the director of the Portuguese Film Museum in Lisbon for 18 years, and he is responsible for what it is today. He was also a writer, poet, critic and actor. The biographical documentary about his life and work made by his fellow countryman Manuel Mozos is one of those films that defies film criticism in its conventional form. If film criticism is deficient in general for trying to speak about a medium that entails several tracks—image, dialogue, music and so on—by using a single-track medium, i.e., words, then the conventional form of film criticism can be deficient, as it is in this specific case. The history of da Costa’s life work is what it is, however poetically presented it may be—it is literally a...

João Bénard da Costa's essay on Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954) is now available in nine languages. Do we fully appreciate the impact of Cornell Woolrich on cinema? What does Ida Lupino's Outrage (1950) have to say about "what we now know to call rape culture"? Plus Boris Nelepo on Alain Resnais's Life of Riley, Kenji Fujishima and Carson Lund on Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death, Joseph Nechvatal on Henri Langlois and more. » - David Hudson...

There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can't do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you."

—Franz Kafka, "Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way."

Above: Director Vítor Gonçalves

Behold the Palace Square in Lisbon—or rather, Praça do Comércio, where the Royal Ribeira Palace stood for nearly two hundred years. In the 18th century, the palace was destroyed by the Great Lisbon Earthquake, never to be restored (instead was built a new one, though, not for the King to live) hence the new name—The Square of Commerce. Here, in the seat of Fascist power, tens of thousands people would gather to listen to Salazar's orations (see Brandos Costumes by Alberto Seixas Santos); then came the Carnation Revolution.