“Ubu”

The first feature-length fiction film by Portuguese visual artist, cinematographer and director Paulo Abreu is a successful and highly cinematic adaptation of the work written in 1896 by the Frenchman Alfred Jarry, considered a precursor of Dadaism and Surrealism, and the first of a trilogy, which satirizes the ambition for power and its misuse by using the parody of Shakespearean situations, characters and motifs. Shot in highly contrasted black and white and making very good use of real settings such as castles and fortresses (all the work of artistic direction and costumes is careful and convincing, without pointing to a specific historical period), Ubu It captures visually, in its diabolical rhythm and performances, the iconoclastic, grotesque, unruly and joyful spirit of Jarry’s work. It is one of the Portuguese films of the year.

“The Stone Dreams of Giving Flowers”

In 2013 he left The stone still waits to blooma collection of Raúl Brandão’s scattered literary, journalistic and memoir sketches, compiled in nearly 40 publications. Admirer of the author’s work. The fishermenRodrigo Areias seeks, in The stone dreams of bloominggive form and cinematic cohesion to this varied set of texts, taking as a reference the direct and raw way in which the writer saw and described the poor, the poverty and misfortune of his fellow men, and his pessimistic reflections on existence. The film, which has a soundtrack by Dada Garbeck and will have several screenings in a Cine-Concert format throughout the country, is limited and repetitive from a dramatic point of view, strongly “literary” and dragged out, and very boring. The concept of The stone dreams of blooming Maybe it would have worked better on stage.

“Reality”

This film by American playwright Tina Satter is based on her 2019 play, This is a rooman example of so-called “word-for-word theatre,” in which verbatim transcripts of court cases, recordings from secret or other wiretaps, or official reports are used for dramatic purposes. In this case, these are transcripts of dialogues between the young linguist, translator, and yoga teacher Reality Winner, who worked for a company under contract with the NSA, and the FBI agents who were waiting for her at the door of her home in Augusta, Georgia, on July 3, 2017, with a search warrant. Reality would later be arrested, accused of having sent a confidential document to a magazine. online politician, tried and sentenced to five years in prison. Reality It was chosen as the film of the week by Observador and you can read the review here.