Petra Costa
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“This Work is a Product of Survival”: Lea Glob on Tribeca 2023 Premiere Apolonia, Apolonia
[Editor’s note: Apolonia, Apolonia opens Friday, Jan. 12, at DCTV Firehouse.] Premiering in international competition at last year’s IDFA, where it took top prize, Lea Glob’s (2015’s Olmo and The Seagull) Apolonia, Apolonia is an intense character study of French figurative painter Apolonia Sokol. The Danish director met the artist, who is of Danish and Polish descent, while searching for the protagonist of her first doc while attending the Danish Film School, and then trailed her for the next 13 years. And while the bohemian free spirit, who was raised in a Paris underground theater founded by her eccentric parents (an […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 10, 2023 -
“…An Attempt to see Anorexia From a Perspective That Goes Beyond That of the Spectacle”: Moara Passoni on Her CPH:DOX Debut Ecstasy
Premiering in the DOX:AWARD main competition at this year’s (now digital) CPH:DOX, Ecstasy (Êxtase) is the astonishing debut of Brazilian filmmaker Moara Passoni, a longtime collaborator of The Edge of Democracy Oscar nominee Petra Costa (who serves as the doc’s producer). It’s a mix of fiction and nonfiction, of historical images and staged scenes, of autobiographical diary entries obsessively developing a “geometry of hunger” even as political chaos grips ’90s Brazil (and it’s all tied together by a stunning soundtrack, including music by David Lynch and Lykke Li). It’s also a startlingly unusual coming-of-age story, one in which the director […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 26, 2020 -
“Watching The Battle of Chile Helped Me to Have the Courage to Trust my Intuition…”: Petra Costa on Her Oscar-nominated Doc The Edge of Democracy
Access, access, access — be it physical, emotional, or preferably both — is the doc filmmaker’s equivalent of location. And Brazilian director Petra Costa manages to get it in spades. Currently streaming on Netflix, her Oscar-nominated epic The Edge of Democracy, the third film in a personal, award-winning trilogy that began with the 2009 short Undertow Eyes, followed by her debut feature Elena three years later, is easily Costa’s most ambitious to date. With fly-on-the-wall camerawork, and guided by her eloquent voiceover narration, Costa captures up close and in real time the democratic car wreck of recent corruption scandals in Brazil that led to the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 5, 2020 -
“Now is an Interesting Moment, When the Cruelties and Inequality are More Exposed than Ever”: Petra Costa on her Netflix-Premiering Doc on Brazilian Politics, The Edge of Democracy
Politics is confusing at the best of times. But in the age of Brexit, Trump and now Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, it’s impossible to keep track of the fake news, alternative facts and the good old-fashioned lies, damned lies and statistics. Since January 1st of 2019, President Bolsonaro has been ruling the roost in Brazil, following hot on the heels of a president who was almost impeached (Michel Temer), one who was impeached (Dilma Roussef) and one who now keeps a prison bed warm (Lula). The political shenanigans came so thick and fast from the biggest nation in South America […]
by Kaleem Aftab on Jun 19, 2019 -
Women Directors in Locarno: Anne Émond, Athena Rachel Tsangari, Petra Costa and Lea Glob
Chevalier is a film about six men vacationing on a yacht in the middle of the Aegean Sea. After the world premiere in the main international competition at the Locarno International Film Festival, I climbed an arduous, though relatively small Swiss mountain to sit down with director Athina Rachel Tsangari during her final hours in Locarno. My own last hours in Switzerland were spent with Anne Émond, whose film Our Loved Ones also celebrated its world premiere in Locarno. Our Loved Ones is about how a suicide affects a family living in a small town outside Quebec. Both Our Loved […]
by Taylor Hess on Aug 31, 2015 -
Dispatches from CPH:DOX and Borscht 9
International Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival – CPH:DOX 2014 by Pamela Cohn There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains. They are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way. Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, the stories we continually re-categorize and refine. This sort of sharing — this communion — would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified and seen as private, exclusively ours. —from Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s film The 50 Year […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2015 -
Five Questions with Elena Director Petra Costa
In the astounding and lyrical Elena, Petra Costa charts the journey of her charismatic, troubled older sister from their youth in Brazil to their year abroad in New York, where Elena is consumed by her pursuit of an acting career. Juggling found footage, voiceovers, interviews, and visual metaphors with effortless aplomb, Elena maintains the utmost intimacy despite the far-reaching chronology and geography of its subject. Elena is a love letter to her lost soul of a sister, and Costa’s gaze is as honest in its examination as its reverence. In fitting fashion, Costa recorded her responses to Filmmaker’s questions, with […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 9, 2013
