Unspoken Cinema

  September the 5th, 2026, at the Venice Mostra, Pedro Costa was awarded the 27th Robert Bresson prize ! Cinematografo article [ITALIANO]

  Latest addition to the Library page :  "The Haunted Cinema of Pedro Costa is the most complete treatment of his work, exploring Costa's feature films from Blood to Vitalina Varela, and from the documentaries to the short films, museum exhibitions, and the forthcoming Daughters of Fire. Authors James Naremore and Darlene J. Sadlier situate Costa within the history and culture of Portugal, at the same time providing insightful close readings and stylistic analysis of the films. Their work explores the unusual features of his artistry and illuminates his unique contribution to cinema." The Haunted Cinema of Pedro Costa  ; 2025 ; Naremore/Sadlier

  Masterclass Pedro Costa | IFFR 2020 (YouTube) 1h37" International Film Festival Rotterdam (25 Jan 2020)

  Seeing With Another's Eyes: Slow Cinema and Marginalised Communities (Joe Turrell) 16 march 2021 (28min) Joe Turrell reads his essay from the Cambridge Review of Books, on Slow Cinema and in particular 3 auteurs : Pedro COSTA, Lav DIAZ and WANG Bing. ( text here  - January 25th 2020) "In documenting the precarious existences of their subjects these directors use techniques rooted in a distinct cinematic philosophy: ’Slow Cinema’. It is this approach that gives these films their power, and in employing these radical techniques these directors open the door to a relationship with their subject matter which is not available through conventional methods of filmmaking. [..] First, a historical/definitional note on the term ‘Slow Cinema’. Slow Cinema is not a precisely defined or delineated collection of films and filmmakers; |..] it is a useful way of grouping together a set of filmmakers arising largely out of the mid-1990s festival circuit, whose films share important aestheti...

Fireflies is a print magazine, a beautifully crafted book, published between Berlin and Melbourne by founders Annabel Brady-Brown and Giovanni Marchini Camia: (...) Each issue assembles an international group of writers and visual artists to celebrate the work of two extraordinary filmmakers through personal essays, interviews and creative responses. (...) We print responses to cinema that are personal, daring and that wouldn’t necessarily be found in other film journals­: short fiction, visual art, poetry, memoir, comics, and creative non-fiction that experiments with multiple forms. (...) What is interesting to Unspoken Cinema is the filmmakers they chose, always by pair, are familiar with the list of CCC filmmakers : Issue #1 : Pasolini / Apichatpong Weerasethakul  (out of print) Issue #2 : Kiarostami / Tarr  (out of print) Issue #3 : Claire Denis / Jia Zhangke Issue #4 : Pedro Costa / Ben Rivers Issue #5 : Angela Schanelec / Agnès Varda

Pour un cinéma contemporain soustractif Antony Fiant (Juin 2014) extrait PDF  / Site de l'éditeur Résumé : Depuis le début du XXIe siècle, on observe l'apparition régulière de films minimalistes manifestant une réticence marquée envers le scénario, le récit, la parole, la musique et la psychologie. Qu'ils relèvent de la fiction, du documentaire, ou des deux à la fois, les films de quinze cinéastes du monde entier (Lisandro Alonso, Wang Bing, Alain Cavalier, Pedro Costa, Darejan Omirbaev, Béla Tarr, entre autres) sont ici analysés d'un point de vue esthétique et dramaturgique pour mieux mettre en évidence un geste soustractif. Moins d'histoire, moins de dialogues, moins de décors, ces caractéristiques manifestent une belle foi en l'art du cinéma et en sa capacité de suggestion. Cet ouvrage veut réaffirmer les spécificités d’un art de la mise en scène, de l’espace et du temps. Force est de constater la présence dans le cinéma le plus contemporain (i...

AV Festival 12 : As Slow As Possible  International Festival of Art, Technology, Music and Film Newcastle, Gateshead, Middlesbrough and Sunderland (UK) 1st - 31st March 2012 [ PDF ] website In the run-up to London 2012 with its motto of “Faster, Higher, Stronger” we propose an alternative slower pace and relaxed rhythm to counter the accelerated speed of today. Titled after ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) by pioneering artist John Cage, the theme explores how artists have stretched, measured and marked the passage of time. Some works last the full 31 days, others are infinite in duration or move imperceptibly slowly: 14 seconds become 31 minutes, one hour becomes 24, and we can all dream together in a 12-hour sleep concert Century of Birthing (2011/Lav Diaz/The Philippines) Slow Cinema is a series of over thirty landmark films from leading international filmmakers, focused around slowness, and interwoven through AV Festival 12....

Rooms of Colossal Bones – Pedro Costa’s Trilogy (26 June, 2008) By Ana Balona de Oliveira (full article at Mute ) excerpts: "It is not surprising James Quandt titled an essay on the director’s work ‘ Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa ’ [at Artforum ]. Some of the shots of Bones , In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth , most frequently those of poorly lit and impoverished interiors, resemble painterly still lives: dark shacks into which scarce rays of sunlight enter just to illuminate a half empty bottle of wine, a smashed piece of old furniture, unexpected red flowers, but also the back of a neck, an old, beaten up hand, the longing of an immigrant labourer’s eye for his Cape Verdean forgotten youth and lost love. The phrase ‘still lives’ gains here, therefore, a double meaning – not only does it refer to the painterly, shadowy objects that accompany the quietly empty despair of Fontaínhas’ inhabitants, but also to these ghostly characters’ lives themselves, filmed in the resist...

Pedro COSTA (born 1959, Portugal) = 49 yold in 2008 12 films/ 4 screenplays (1st film:1984/latest film:2007) INSPIRED BY : Straub/Huillet, Jean Rouch, John Ford, Nouvelle Vague, Duras, Murnau, Charles Laughton, Jacques Tourneur, António Reis C.C.C. films (strict model in red) : Ne Change Rien (2009) v ; Tarrafal (2007) v ; Juventude Em Marcha/Colossal Youth (2006) v ; Où gît votre sourire enfoui? (2001) v ; No Quarto da Vanda/In Vanda's Room (2000) v ; Ossos/Bones (1997) v ; Casa de Lava (1994) v ; O Sangue/Blood (1989) v INFLUENCE ON : ? Quick scroll : BIBLIOGRAPHY | ONLINE ARTICLES | INTERVIEW | COSTA TEXTS | WEBSITES | DOCUMENTARY Ne Change Rien (2009) Cannes 2009 " Missives from Cannes : There outta be a moonlight saving time " By: David Phelps (15 May 2009, The Auteurs ) Links By: David Hudson ( IFC The Daily ) Costa Brief By: Daniel Kasman ( The Auteurs ) "Pour que tout soit différent" By: Antoine Thirion ( Cahiers du cinéma , #645, May ...

(This is a great article recommended by Celinejulie ) Are You Sitting Comfortably? by Jonathan Romney, The Guardian (October 7, 2000) . Here are some highlights regarding CCC : "The film in question was Satantango , made in 1994 by the Hungarian director Bela Tarr, and something of a legend among aficionados of painstakingly slow European art cinema. A film that long and that sombre is not likely to become an international art-house hit along the lines of Jean de Florette , or even to find a comfortable slot on the festival circuit. But Tarr's film has a reputation as something more than a lugubrious oddity of monstrous proportions - it is a powerful, visionary piece of cinema that creates its own stark world and keeps the viewer compellingly locked in for its duration. (...) his most recent film Werckmeister Harmonies recently caused a stir at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where viewers received it as a genuine cinematic UFO. Filmed in Tarr's characteristic slow, analyti...