Theater of the Matters x Metrograph: António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro

“Largely unknown outside Portugal, filmmakers António Reis (1927-1991) and Margarida Cordeiro (b. 1939) are legendary figures in their native country. 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 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. A formative influence on Pedro Costa—a former student of Reis—these works endure as hieroglyphs of an entirely new ethic and aesthetic of film. We are proud to present them all in this rare and comprehensive retrospective.” —Series curators Edward McCarry and Graham Carter (The Theater of the Matters)