António Reis (1927-1991) and Margarida Cordeiro (1938) are central names in Portuguese film history, tutoring figures for an entire generation of filmmakers, from Pedro Costa to João Pedro Rodrigues. Cordeiro studied medicine and worked as a psychiatrist; Reis was a poet and film lecturer. Interdisciplinary in nature, the duo’s films deal with rural communities, rituals and landscape through a political and poetic lens, transfiguring reality by resorting to other arts and disciplines. The proposed season (November 29 to December 11) includes film screenings, a study day, a music lecture-performance, and a reading group.

Following up on the season, this publication, conceived and produced in partnership with Courtisane Festival (Belgium), frames the work of Reis-Cordeiro through notions like those of translation, passage and transformation. These account for different processes of transposition that take place within the films themselves, but also in the ways of transmitting them: be it the movement to recover objects from popular culture then recontextualized as art; the way the film works with literary texts or different forms of writing; the exercise of subtitling these films into another language or “telling” them to someone; or the technological transposition from analogue to digital in relation to the recent digitalization of these films.

Film Exhibition Website (ICA): https://www.ica.art/films/antonio-reis-margarida-cordeiro