Locating himself far from the mainstream of even international art cinema, Pedro Costa is widely regarded as one of the most important artists on the international film scene. Born in 1959, he was already a successful filmmaker when he began to feel, on the set of his third feature Ossos (1997), that something was wrong with the normal way of making films: “We should rethink all of it,” he thought. Jettisoning his professional crew, he made In Vanda’s Room (2000), shot by a one-person crew on a consumer mini-DV camera in Lisbon’s Fountainhas ghetto over the course a year. A […]
by David Barker and Matthew Porterfield on Jul 24, 2015[Paul Dallas’ first report can be read here.] Time wasted and time well spent — a ratio every festivalgoer has to work out when gambling on what to see and miss. At Locarno this year, one had to decide whether or not to devote five hours and forty minutes to a single competition film, the equivalent of four Italian classics from the wonderful Titanus retrospective. It wasn’t easy when the former was Lav Diaz’s From What Is Before, an early frontrunner and eventual winner of the Golden Leopard, and the latter all screened on 35mm — an increasingly powerful incentive […]
by Paul Dallas on Aug 19, 2014