O Riso e a Faca/ I Only Rest in the Storm, the second feature film of Portuguese director Pedro Pinho, has been added to the selection of Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section, which highlights “new trends, new paths and new countries of cinema.”
The film is co-produced by Still Moving (France), Bubbles Project (Brazil), and Bucharest-based deFilm, and produced by Uma Pedra no Sapato and Terratreme Filmes (Portugal).
Pedro Pinho studied at the Lisbon Theatre and Film School, at the ENS – Louis Lumière, and completed the post-graduate courses of Directing and Screenwriting at the London Film School at the C. Gulbenkian Foundation. He made his debut with the documentary Bab Sebta, co-directed with Frederico Lobo, which premiered at FIDMarseille in 2008, where it won the Marseille Espérance Prize.
He then directed Um Fim do Mundo, which was screened in the Generation section of the Berlinale in 2013, and in 2014, the documentary As Cidades e as Trocas, co-directed with Luísa Homem, which was screened at both FIDMarseille and Art of the Real at Lincoln Center in New York.
In 2017, his first fiction feature, A Fábrica de Nada, premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize awarded by the International Critics, and went on to win 20 other awards at festivals around the world. He is the co-founder of Terratreme Filmes.
“With I Only Rest in the Storm, I wanted to develop further the experiment initiated in A Fábrica de Nada, placing the discourse at the center of a collective wound — the neocolonial frontier. […] In essence, it is a story of encounters, disappearance, and unequal expectations — a search for escape routes, both intimate and political,” Pinho explains.
This film “is an impressive odyssey at a narrative and visual level. It explores the complex relationships and the dynamics of an expatriate community, addressing themes such as neocolonialism, the search for identity, and climate anxiety,” producer Ioana Lascăr (deFilm) says.
The complete list of films selected in the main competition and the Un Certain Regard section this year is available here.
(Photo: deFilm)
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