Selection 6: João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata / Where Is This Street? or With No Before And After

31 March, 2023 - 17:00
Sphinx Cinema

 

 

In the presence of João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata

Onde Fica Esta Rua? ou Sem Antes Nem Depois (Where Is This Street? or With No Before And After)

João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata
,
PT
,
2022
,
DCP
,
88'

"From our window one can see a set of the film The Green Years, directed by Paulo Rocha in 1963. This was our starting point: guided by Rocha's gaze, we look back at the places of that film. The successive geological, urbanistic and social strata of Lisbon, besieged by the pandemic that interrupted the shooting, are drawn out in front of our camera, like a contemporary jazz impro from a score written in 1963."

Life partners and frequent co-directors, the polymath talents of João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata have together invented an unclassifiable body of resolutely contemporary films that provocatively dance between fiction and nonfiction while also meditating subtly on film history. Their latest collaboration, Where Is This Street? or With No Before And After intertwines avant-garde, autobiographical and meta-cinematic threads that have defined their work together while also reflecting ruminatively upon a film that shaped their lives and the path of postwar Portuguese cinema, The Green Years (1963), by Rodrigues’ film school teacher and beloved mentor Paulo Rocha. Building on their evocative first feature collaboration, the dizzying neo-noir city symphony The Last Time I Saw Macao (2012), their latest film explores pandemic Lisbon as a haunted city shaped and inhabited by intimately personal yet shared cinematic memories, recollections of films shot on the streets, and of the streets seen and fleetingly, lovingly inhabited on the silver screen. (Harvard Film Archive)

 

Portuguese spoken, English subtitles