Festival offers new cinema from Portuguese masters

At 102, the legendary Manoel de Oliveira isn’t just cinema’s oldest working director. A prolific and still-adventurous auteur, his career spans acting, documentary work and narrative features. Remarkably, he is currently at work on another film.

“You can’t point to Manoel de Oliveira and say, ‘He’s emblematic of Portuguese cinema.’ He’s emblematic of himself; he’s almost his own industry,” says Jim Healy, director of programming for UW–Madison’s Cinematheque.

Portugal has been home to some of the most daring filmmakers of recent years. Although the films of young directors like Pedro Costa, João Pedro Rodrigues, and Miguel Gomes are altogether unique, they — and Oliveira — share a need to push the boundaries of filmmaking past even the most intrepid art-house themes.

This adventurous spirit will be on full display during this year’s Festival de Cine: New Portuguese Cinema. From Friday through Sunday, Jan. 28-30, Cinematheque will present the work of Oliveira, Gomes and Rodrigues. The festival is supported in part by Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program (LACIS) and the Center for European Studies (CES).

Of the few Portuguese films that make it to Madison, even fewer are new releases. With that in mind, festival organizers created a lineup that balances shorts and features by young greats Rodrigues and Gomes with the latest contribution from Oliveira, Portugal’s preeminent director — behind the camera since 1931.

“His stuff is really hard to get. That speaks to the point of how important events like this are,” says Healy. “Even major filmmakers in Europe, who have been working since the dawn of cinema, we don’t know.”

Nationality is only one of the major differences from last year’s lineup, which featured Brazilian melodramas of the 1950s. Mike King, chief projectionist for Cinematheque, describes those films as conventional, popular cinema: the period equivalent of a multiplex movie.

“This year’s films are not multiplex movies, but they’re exciting in a different way,” says King. “They don’t necessarily all fit together, but they’re all individual, pushing the envelope, expanding the idea of what a movie can be. If anything, these are very unpredictable movies. They’re on the vanguard of narrative.”

On Friday, Jan. 28, the Festival de Cine kicks off at 7 p.m. with Oliveira’s “The Strange Case of Angelica (O Estranho Caso de Angélica).” Completed after his 101st birthday, the most recent feature from the unstoppable master of Portuguese cinema uses liberal doses of fantasy to tell another of his elegiac tales of thwarted romance. When the young and beautiful Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) dies, a young photographer (Ricardo Trêpa, Oliveira’s grandson) is summoned to take her final picture. Angelica magically comes to life, but only when the photographer looks at her through his viewfinder! (Portugal, 2010, 35mm, 97 min.; in Portuguese with English subtitles)

Saturday’s program features shorts and a feature by Miguel Gomes, described by Healy as “the centerpiece of the festival.” At 7 p.m., “Miguel Gomes Shorts: Meanwhile, Christmas Inventory and Canticle of All Creatures” evokes the “musical comedy” qualities of his early work. These three sketch-like shorts deliver in characteristically elliptical and playful ways (Portugal, 1999-2006, 35mm, 71min.; in Portuguese with English subtitles).

King is particularly excited to bring Gomes’ work back to Madison. After booking Gomes’ film “Our Beloved Month of August” for two sold-out showings at the 2009 Wisconsin Film Festival, King still calls it his favorite film of the past few years.

At 8:15 p.m., view Gomes’ first feature, the audacious comedy “The Face You Deserve (A Cara Que Mereces).” What begins as a hilarious depiction of a mid- (or third-) life crisis turns into a fever dream of arcane rules explicitly made to be broken. José Airosa, Gracinda Nave and Sara Graça depict the sentiment “Until 30, you have the face that God has given you. After that, you get the face you deserve” (Portugal, 2004, 35mm, 108 min.; in Portuguese with English subtitles).

The festival wraps up at 7 p.m. on Sunday with the third film by João Pedro Rodrigues. In “To Die Like a Man (Morrer Como Um Homem),” an aging Lisbon drag queen suffers all manner of Almodovarian indignities before a transcendent retreat to the natural world. Featured at the 2009 Cannes and New York film festivals, this bold, tricky opus both exploits and thwarts the tropes that plague conventional gay cinema. With Alexander David, Gonçalo Ferreira De Almeida and Fernando Gomes (Portugal, 2009, 35mm, 133 min.; in Portuguese with English subtitles).

“With Rodrigues, we don’t show a lot of gay cinema at the Cinematheque,” says King. “He’s another exciting, innovative filmmaker that doesn’t come to Sundance or the Orpheum.”

This weekend also paves the way for a major campus visit by filmmaker Pedro Costa in April. Costa’s massive Colossal Youth screened here at LACIS 2007, and he will present his latest film, “Ne Change Rien,” on Saturday, April 16.

“Costa is a world-class filmmaker,” says King. “His stuff was put out recently by the Criterion Collection, so people can catch up before the event in April. To have him here is incredible.”

For Healy, the festival represents one of his first major programming blocks since coming to campus in October. With one Costa retrospective under his belt elsewhere, he recognizes the significance of spotlighting Portuguese cinema at this point in time.

“If you wanted to see Portuguese-language cinema over the last 40 years, chances are you saw a Brazilian film,” says Healy. “Portuguese cinema really has enjoyed this burst of creativity.”