Pedro Costa’s O Sangre

Vicente (Pedro Hestnes) and Clara (Ines de Medeiros) create their own version of family to combat the darkness in O SANGRE aka Blood (1989), directed by Pedro Costa.

Most film aficionados known that the Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s in Brazil was influenced by both Neorealism and New Wave filmmakers but became an identifiable style of its own. Portugal also had their own Cinema Novo movement in the sixties but it transitioned into a different aesthetic approach in the 1980s known as “The School of Reis,” named after Antonio Reis, a filmmaker and professor at the Lisbon Theater and Film School. Reis influenced a new generation of filmmakers that includes Manuela Viegas, Joaquim Sapinho, Joao Pedro Rodgrigues and Pedro Costa to name a few. Among this group Costa is probably the best known in the U.S. due to his work being exhibited at film festivals and art houses as well as a trilogy of his films known as Letters from Fontainhas being distributed on DVD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection. Less known is his 1989 debut feature, O Sangre aka Blood, which Michelle Carey of Senses of Cinema called, “Undoubtedly one of the most remarkable film debuts of the last 20 years.”

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Lisbon: City of Dreams, City of Despair

The Covid-19 crisis has taken its toll on film distribution and exhibition as we know it and there is no guaranteed that attending films in the near future will resemble anything like movie-going prior to the pandemic. This challenging situation has encouraged some distributors and filmmakers to come up with more innovative ways to reach their audience and one of them is to offer direct streaming options to viewers. This has resulted in some new movies receiving a world premiere showcase on the internet along with restored classics from aboard that never received an American release such as Paulo Rocha’s Os Verdes Anos aka The Green Years (1963), filmed in Lisbon, Portugal’s capital.   Continue reading