Continuing their major streak of acquiring filmographies only seen through super-rare repertory bookings and sub-par DVD rips, Cinema Guild—we are pleased to exclusively reveal—will release the work of Portuguese directors António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro. The deal includes their three feature films—”a celebrated trilogy centered in the isolated, near-mythical Northeast of Portugal” comprising Trás-os-Montes (1976), Ana (1982), and Rosa de Areia (1989)—and was negotiated by Cinema Guild’s Peter Kelly and Edward McCarry with Cinemateca Portuguesa, who represent the films on behalf of Cordeiro. The latter was also responsible for the digitization and restoration of these three films.
Cinema Guild’s rollout begins next month with the TIFF retrospective “António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro, Restored,” which runs from May 8 to May 17, followed by further showings in Canada and the United States this year; home-video and digital releases are to come. Regarding TIFF’s series, Senior Film Curator Andréa Picard said, “Ripe for discovery in North America, the work of Reis and Cordeiro has left an immense imprint upon contemporary Portuguese cinema. Their partnership formed a crucible of radical will and style, merging formal rigour with a sensuality that produced some of the most breathtaking images in film history.” Meanwhile, Cinemateca Portuguesa’s director Rui Machado says, “The films by Reis and Cordeiro, originally shot and screened on film, have not aged or lost any of their beautiful original character and personality in these new restored digital copies.”
Largely unknown outside Portugal, Reis (1927-1991) and Cordeiro (b. 1939) are revered figures in their native country. Reis was a poet, a folklorist, and an ethnographer; Cordeiro, a psychiatrist by trade. Across a small yet luminous body of work, the duo forged a cinema of profound commitment, deeply rooted in the language, labors, myths, and dreams of the land and people of Portugal’s remote Northeast, a region called Trás-os-Montes. With one foot firmly anchored in the earth and the other in the cosmos, Reis and Cordeiro’s work evokes the deep, cyclical time of folk tradition. Their films are a collision of documentary and poetry, fact and fantasy, the ancient and the avant-garde—a vertigo of contradictions at once harmonious and sharply unreconciled. Admired by the likes of Jacques Rivette, Marguerite Duras, João César Monteiro, and Joris Ivens, Reis and Cordeiro continue to loom over Portuguese cinema, notably in the work of Pedro Costa, a former student of Reis.