Film
Where Is This Street? or With No Before and After
- 5PM
Paying ardent tribute to Paulo Rocha’s 1963 debut The Green Years, directors João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra de Mata chart the shooting locations of the Cinema Novo landmark, street by street and frame by frame. Drawing out the geological, urbanistic, and social strata of their labyrinthine Lisbon, the directors formulate a sui generis work that bears the freewheeling eloquence of improvised jazz.
Departing from Paulo Rocha’s The Green Years, the inaugural moment of the Portuguese Cinema Novo, João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata drift through a locked-down Lisbon in search of subtle signs of life. Along the way, bitterly comic examples of the class character of pandemic responses butt up against strange moments of serenity. Their camera moves with a disoriented attention, equally curious and apprehensive of what it might find in this new world. As in life, history returns in strange and unexpected ways, though here that return occurs in mercifully gentle register. —Phil Coldiron
Leadership support for BAM Access Programs provided by the Jerome L. Greene Foundation.
Leadership support for BAM Film provided by the Ford Foundation and The Thompson Family Foundation
Filmmakers Darol Olu Kae and Mawena Yehouessi craft formally inventive works about, respectively, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the Myth of “Lascar,” examining communal forms of artistic expression.