Escaping the future: o sangue

• Autor(a) principal: Ribas, Daniel
• Data de Publicação: 2009
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/7469
• topic: Pedro Costa; Cinema português; O Sangue

Texto de apresentação do filme "O Sangue", primeira obra do realizador português Pedro Costa. Argumenta-se que esta obra, muito diferente do resto da filmografia deste autor, obedece a uma narrativa específica, onde as personagens estão sempre presas ao passado. Internationally acclaimed for his more recent films, Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa has been making previously unheralded work since the late 1980s. After finishing his studies at Lisbon’s School of Cinema, Costa worked as an assistant director to a number of Portuguese filmmakers. His first film was a short – called Cartas a Júlia/Letters to Julia – made for a Portuguese National Television (RTP) series and released in 1988. Just a year later he finished his first feature film, O Sangue/The Blood. The 1980s were, in Portugal, a time when the regular production of films, supported by the Portuguese Cinema Institute (a governmental institution for the promotion of cinema), really began. These were times when João Bènard da Costa, a Portuguese cinema theorist (and director of the Portuguese Cinémathèque), begun to talk about a “Portuguese Cinema School”, a concept that relates to and describes a particular way of making films, either in relation to a specific view of production or in relation to specific themes. This group was related to the Portuguese nouvelle vague, a movement that radically changed Portuguese cinema in the 1960s. Called “Cinema Novo”, this movement included such filmmakers as Paulo Rocha, Fernando Lopes, João César Monteiro and António-Pedro Vasconcelos. The so-called “Portuguese Cinema School” also included a wide spectrum of directors such as António Reis, João Mário Grilo and João Botelho. Manoel de Oliveira, of course, has to be accredited as the master of the various generations, influencing all of them. In the context of the economic growth of the 80s – Portugal joined the European Union in 1986 – the Portuguese producer Paulo Branco started to support (with money from the Portuguese Cinema Institute) a new generation of Portuguese directors such as Botelho, João Canijo and Pedro Costa. It opened the door for a new generation who had its own problems and strategies.