DOCUMENTARY CINEMA
Filming the Other – cinema as relationship
João Rosas
ARTISTIC RESIDENCIES OF THE MASTER’S PROGRAMME IN ARTS OF SOUND AND IMAGE_ESAD.CR IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE CULTURAL ASSOCIATION OSSO_3RD EDITION_2024
22 TO 26 APRIL, 2024
OSSO FACILITIES IN THE VILLAGE OF S. GREGÓRIO, CALDAS DA RAINHA
This proposal was born out of a belief in the power and relevance of cinema in current times, when individualism and atomisation seem to have broken down connections between people.
Cinema is not just a storytelling machine. First and foremost, it is a machine of enquiry that, since its creation, has invited us to take a closer look at the world and those who inhabit it. If we believe in it, we’ll see how only cinema allows us to create certain relationships that wouldn’t exist otherwise.
This is one of its richnesses, if not its greatest – the possibility it gives us to discover the Other, and in this movement of approach and questioning, to discover our own place in the world by discovering how to film it. So let’s accept its invitation, with our arms and eyes wide open, camera and microphone in hand, to try, over the course of a week, to create a (draft) collective mosaic-film that is a portrait of the village of São Gregório and the people who live and work there.
JOÃO ROSAS (Lisbon, 1981) is the author of three books of short stories and films such as “My Mother is a Pianist” (2005), “Birth of a City” (2009), “Entrecampos” (2012), “Maria do Mar” (2015), which premiered in Locarno and won awards in Portugal, Spain and Brazil, and “Catavento” (2020), which won the Best Short Film award at BAFICI 2021 and a Special Jury Mention at the 18th Brive Festival. His latest film, “Death of a City”, won the DocAlliance Award for Best Feature Film. He has just completed his first feature-length fiction film.