Screening

About Pedro Costa

Year Released:

2011

Genres:

Film Director Pedro Costa will be a Jorgensen Guest Lecturer on October 6th at 3pm in the IU Cinema.  The lecture will be in interview format, led by James Naremore Professor Emeritus, IU Department of Communication and Culture, and Darlene Sadlier, Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Born in Lisbon in December 1959, Pedro Costa began studying film with António Reis at the Lisbon Film School.  He later worked as an assistant-director for João Botelho and João César Monteiro, making his first film The Blood (O Sangue), which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, in 1989.

Costa’s films have influenced a generation of world filmmakers who work to blur the border between documentary and narrative film. With his slum trilogy, Letters from Fontainhas, Costa revolutionized independent cinema, proving that stunning, epic films could be made with almost no crew or budget. Costa has had major retrospectives at the Tate Modern in London and the Harvard Film Archive. He has been named “one of the most important artists on the international film scene today” by the Criterion Collection.

In addition to delivering the Jorgensen Lecture on October 6, Costa will visit film production classes on campus, participate in Q&A’s after screenings of his films, and introduce a complete retrospective of his work.

The retrospective includes the films Down to Earth (1984); Ossos (1997); his complete shorts from 2001-2007; Colossal Youth (2007); The Blood (1989); In Vanda’s Room (2000); Ne Change Rien (2009); and Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001). Chicago film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (who will be introducing Costa and one of his films) comments "Pedro Costa is one of the rare filmmakers who reinvents how we think about cinema--not just his own cinema, but everyone else's."