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Film Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa

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Few filmmakers have elicited as strong and divided a response from critics and cinephiles as Portuguese director Pedro Costa. He isn't so much an aesthete (an unwieldy word, given his sparse palette of natural light and near-interminable shots) as an ascetic, fashioning purposefully vague mixtures of documentary and fiction out of the threadbare lives of Lisbon's working poor. As this career retrospective shows, though, Costa's formalistic presentation doesn't belie his empathy toward junkies, day laborers, and the dispossessed. He knows his film history, too — yes, Ozu and Bresson are obvious antecedents, but Down to Earth (1994) also reimagines Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1943).

– Matt Sussman

Note: Costa appears in person at many screenings, and delivers the Regent's Lecture on Sun Mar 9 (3pm); admission to the lecture is free and open to the public.