Meeting with Pedro Costa

“If you don't risk yourself and the people with whom you're working in almost every shot you make, it's not good, it's useless, it's just another film.”

“Si, junto a las personas con las que trabajas, no arriesgas en casi todas las tomas que haces, no es bueno ni sirve para nada, es una película más.”

Pedro Costa is an explorer. Not a grandiose explorer like Werner Herzog or John Ford; Pedro Costa explores the territory, focusing on details, on intimacy. Each of his films is an evolution of the previous one, he expands his language and, through it, explores his relationship with others and with himself.

His aesthetic approach reflects the principles of what is known as "direct cinema". With an austere language, open to experimentation, and a decided narrative sobriety, he portrays the dispossessed, the immigrants, the misunderstood, the fugitives, the drug addicts and the fragile; the inhabitants of the slums, of his hometown —Lisbon— like the neighbourhood of Fontainhas.

Indebted to Portuguese Novo Cinema and renown directors like Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Pedro Costa's work continues the path initiated in Portugal by Manoel de Oliveira and António Campos, in which films are inspired by the concept of "visual anthropology", a tradition also practised by filmmakers such as António Reis and Ricardo Costa, who used the devices of docufiction before him.

Inviting Pedro Costa, who visited Santiago years ago both to present his film Horse Money and to visit other festivals in the city, is no coincidence. On the contrary, there is a fundamental characteristic in his cinema that is, perhaps, one of the precepts that most interests us at Curtocircuíto: each film both reflects reality and allows life to seep in and taint the picture. Because it is there, in the blurred line between reality and fiction, where poetry is born.

Jonathan Rosenbaum said of his cinema: "...many of Costa's cinematic points of reference are Hollywood auteurs. One might even say that he has been consciously remaking some films by John Ford, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, and Jacques Tourneur on his own terms, in Portuguese slums, latterly on digital video, with non-professional actors, some of them exiles from the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde or drug addicts".

Moderado por Eloy Enciso: 

Uno de los principales referentes del llamado Novo Cinema Galego, Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro nació en Meira, Lugo, y estudió Medio Ambiente antes de dedicarse al cine.

Dirigió los larogmetrajes Pic-nic (2007), Arraianos (2012) y Longa noite (2019), presentes en festivales de referencia internacional como Locarno, Toronto, New York o Rotterdam, y recibió premios a mejor película o dirección internacionalmente.

En su cine explora la historia y el paisaje gallegas y la relación que hay entre estas y nuestro presente, encontrando personajes y narrativas en la frontera entre la ficción y el documental en la tradición artística y lírica del cine de autor europeo. 

Como muchos autores de su generación, su trabajo transciende las fronteras tradicionales de la sala de cine, y se exhibe en diversos formatos y plataformas: cines, plataformas online, centros de arte y museos como el MoMA, el Reina Sofía o o ICA de Londres.