Tuesday, 29 September 2009, 7.30pm, Room B20, Birkbeck, Mallet Street, London WC1E 7HX

The Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa gave a talk at Birkbeck associated with the retrospective of his work at the Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern in September, October, 2009.

Pedro Costa is the author of  “O Sangue” / The Blood (1989), “Casa de Lava” / Down to Earth (1994), “Ossos” / Bones (1997), “No Quarto da Vanda” / In Vanda’s Room (2000), “Oû gît votre sourire enfoui? / Where does your hidden smile lie? (2001), “Juventude em Marcha” / Colossal Youth (2006) and the short films, “6 Bagatelas” (2003), “Ne Change Rien” (2003), “Tarrafal” (2007) and “The Rabbit Hunters” (2007). He has also developed some installation works, notably for the “FORA / OUT” exhibition at the Museu de Serralves in 2006. Pedro Costa was recently awarded a Regent’s Lectureship by the University of California, Berkeley and was the recipient of the Prémio Gulbenkian, a Portuguese distinction for artists. In 2007 and 2008 his work was presented in several North American Cinematheques, notably at the Anthology Film Archives (New York), the Gene Siskel Film Centre (Chicago), the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), the REDCAT (Los Angeles), the Harvard Film Archive (Harvard), the Wexner Centre for the Arts (Columbus) among others.’Acclaimed in Artforum, Cahiers du cinéma, Film Comment, and Cinema Scope, the Portuguese director Pedro Costa is possibly the most intriguing, relevant filmmaker at work today, captivating viewers with his spare, austere aesthetic, willful ambiguity, and combination of documentary, avant-garde and fiction. While his slow-burn trancelike style is wholly his own, Costa’s earthy portraits of the immigrant and marginalized communities of Lisbon’s slums have emerged from a recognizable, classic narrative background of Ford, Lang, Ozu and Chaplin, touched with the more modernist palette of Straub-Huillet and Béla Tarr.’

– Jason Sanders, Pacific Film Archive notes

Click on Pedro Costa poster pdf format to download a copy.