Opens February 21, 2025 at Metrograph (New York) & Feb. 22 at Doc Films (Chicago)
Largely unknown outside Portugal, filmmakers António Reis (1927-1991) and Margarida Cordeiro (b. 1939) are legendary figures in their native country. Reis was a poet, a folklorist, and an ethnographer; Cordeiro, a psychiatrist by trade. Across the four films they made together, the duo forged a cinema of profound commitment, deeply rooted in the language, labors, myths, dreams, and material realities of a land and a people: namely, the peasants of Trás-os-Montes in Portugal’s remote Northeast. With one foot firmly anchored in the earth and the other in the cosmos, Reis and Cordeiro conjure up the deep, cyclical time of folk tradition. Their films are a collision of the forces of documentary and poetry, fact and fabulation, the ancient and the avant-garde, a vertigo of contradictions at once harmonious and sharply unreconciled. Employing simple and direct means, their work is all the more mystical for being so concrete. “Here and nowhere else. Here and anywhere else”—this is the paradoxical space-time of their films, in the words of Serge Daney. Emerging in the years after the Carnation Revolution of 1974, their poetic-ethnographic filmmaking permanently shook the foundations of Portuguese cinema. It was a formative influence on Pedro Costa, for one: “I had a teacher, António Reis, who believed in stones, in nature. He was a pantheist. He was an animal.” A cult of Reis and Cordeiro has persisted through time, however clandestinely, with contemporaries like Jacques Rivette, Marguerite Duras, João César Monteiro, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Robert Kramer, Jean Rouch, and Joris Ivens all counted among their admirers. Today, these works endure as hieroglyphs of an entirely new ethic and aesthetic of film. We are proud to present all their surviving films in this rare and comprehensive retrospective. Our program includes the three features completed by Reis and Cordeiro, their landmark first collaboration, Jaime (1974), Reis’ two extant shorts from the 1960s, and one of his earliest filmmaking efforts, O Auto da Floripes (1963), a collective endeavor produced by the Experimental Film Section of the Cine-clube do Porto.
Related texts
Jaime, The Unexpected in Portuguese Cinema: António Reis interviewed by João César Monteiro
João César Monteiro’s Introduction to Jaime
Program 1
Ana
Dirs. António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro
1982. 115 min. 4K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
At the center of Ana—Reis and Cordeiro’s second feature—is Ana, an elderly matriarch portrayed by Cordeiro’s own mother (Ana Maria Martins Guerra). She cares for her children and grandchildren in the far-off mountains of Trás-os-Montes. As the children grow and learn to perceive the outer world, we see the evolution of their inner life; meanwhile, Ana grows sick and her imminent death looms. Through a series of non-linear scenes resembling reminiscences and rituals, with dialogue adapted from poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Reis and Cordeiro manifest a link from individual experience to the collective toils of people throughout the ages, and from the collective to the earth and its history, all wrapped up in the cycles of life and death and renewal. Keyed to the resonances of small gestures, footsteps, and whispers, the film sustains the hushed atmosphere of a chamber piece, even as it opens out to vast landscapes, and to eternity.
preceded by:
Painéis do Porto
Dir. António Reis
1963. 16 min. 4K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
Reis’ first film, commissioned by the City Council of Porto, is a short poetic reportage following the activities of workers through this medieval Northern city. With its plain style and attention to the inner revelation of ordinary things, the film evinces a strong continuity with Reis’ work as a poet, his “everyday poems.” From a contemporaneous review in the journal Filme: “[Reis] did not give in to the temptation of romanticism or the cuteness of an elaborate formal effect: he keeps the tone of the report alive and tense, not limiting himself to what is seen but seeking to go further, searching for the roots of what exists.”
Program 2
Trás-os-Montes
Dirs. António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro
1976. 111 min. 2K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
A film of long shadows and smoke in twilight, Trás-os-Montes is an intensive labor of recollection, an epic of a land and a way of life on the edge of oblivion. In 1974, Reis and Cordeiro traveled ten thousand kilometers across this isolated, near-mythical region in the Northeast of Portugal. They recruited a cast of inhabitants old and young from the villages of Bragança and Miranda do Douro to materialize their histories, legends, dreams, and nightmares for the camera. The philosophy of the peasants, their rebellion, their everyday existence far from the laws of church and state, their closeness to ancient things, to trees and rocks—these encounters informed the dialectical approach of the film, where fiction and reality, past and future swell in an immediate present. The result is a work of deep and threatened lyricism. In voiceover, Reis and Cordeiro adapt passages from Kafka and the Chinese poet Po Chü-i, translated to the guttural subdialect of the Northeast. As an act of solidarity with a people facing extinction, Trás-os-Montes echoes through time.
Program 3
Rosa de Areia
Dirs. António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro
1989. 88 min. 4K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
Reis and Cordeiro’s final film is their most cosmic endeavor. A work of sensuous abstraction performed in the open air of Trás-os-Montes, as elusive and exquisite as the “desert rose” of its title. In Reis’ words: “A film made of matter. Matter in constant evolvement. Natural wind becomes tuba wind, actresses’ dresses act side by side with clouds, three-dimensions are defeated by two-dimensions, sequence shots are put to rest by still shots, music is silence and colour is modulated, the purest of lights becomes a floating and diffuse one. Rosa de Areia is but a torrent: it disappears in a slow rotation, a slow translation, moved by the rebellious energy of cinematographic forms.” And Cordeiro: “Rosa de Areia is a film for those who can see and listen as if for the first time; as if it was the first film that came from the earth and spoke about it.”
preceded by:
Do Céu ao Rio
Dirs. António Reis & César Guerra Leal
1964. 17 min. 4K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
This rare short by Reis, another commission, has long been unavailable due to the precarious state of its archival materials. The film documents various aspects in the building of dams along the Cávado River in the Northwest. Filmmaker Fernando Lopes recognized in these early shorts—a third one is known to exist, but remains lost—an uncommon sensitivity, motivating him to produce Jaime with the Centro Português de Cinema a decade later: “I had seen one or two things that Reis had done, small documentaries in which he had worked. I was very impressed with his images in those touristic documentaries that weren’t touristic at all, they were images with a transfigured vision of reality...”
Program 5
Jaime
Dir. António Reis
1974. 35 min. 4K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
While working as a psychiatrist at the Miguel Bombarda sanatorium in Lisbon, Cordeiro discovered a sketch—one among hundreds left behind—by the late Jaime Fernandes, a farm laborer admitted to the institution at 38 years of age, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He would spend the rest of his days there, turning to drawing and painting in the last years of his life. In their first collaboration together, Reis and Cordeiro set out to make a record of this man, a testament to his material existence: the spaces he once inhabited, the things he saw and laid his hands on, his writing, his works. Far from a traditional portrait, images of Fernandes himself are notably absent from the film, but for a single still photograph at the very beginning and end. With a restless and inventive form, using a handheld camera to “[represent] the helplessness of the human eye,” and featuring the music of Louis Armstrong, Stockhausen, and Telemann, Reis and Cordeiro refuse to see Jaime as an abnormal or an outsider; rather, he was poor and imprisoned, a man far from home. “One of the most beautiful films in the history of the cinema,” said João César Monteiro.
preceded by:
O Auto da Floripes
Dir. Experimental Cinema Section of the Cineclube do Porto
1962. 60 min. 4K Restoration.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa.
This short feature is a rigorous documentation of a piece of folk theater, a mixture of pantomime, recitation, and dance performed every year in the early days of August by the villagers of Neves, dating back to the 16th-century. Directed by a collective of amateur filmmakers—among them Reis, then a poet and ethnographer—O Auto da Floripes was a formative early experience for Reis, for “the spirit of love for work, sacrifice and selflessness” involved in the production process. It directly inspired Manoel de Oliveira to recruit Reis as an assistant on Rite of Spring (1963), which is something of a conceptual remake of Auto. In a 1963 letter, Oliveira penned this appreciation: “Are they amateurs? Yes, they are. But they are amateurs in the best sense of the word. The future of our cinema lies in their hands. They are the experimental basis for diverse and non-academic expression, one that is not conventional, pre-fabricated, one-sided or biased: healthy cinema, new cinema, free cinema.”
Special thanks to Inge de Leeuw & Anri Vartanov (Metrograph); Joana de Sousa & Rui Machado (Cinemateca Portuguesa); Ana Carneiro (Cineclube do Porto); Hannah Yang (Doc Films); Andy Rector; Raquel Morais; Stoffel Debuysere (Courtisane Festival); Marta Mateus; Pedro Costa.
