MADRID.- As part of PHotoEspaña 2009, Filmoteca Española presents 14 films by a filmmaker who shoots reality without concessions, getting close to its most heartbreaking and marginal elements. Filmoteca Española offers a panoramic vision of director’s filmography in In Vanda’s Room, Bones or Down to Earth. Pedro Costa is a pioneer in the fusion between documentary and fiction.

Pedro Costa’s cinema carries the documentary to an extreme due to his unusual work and production system. Costa films without a script. He coexists with the protagonists of his films, lengthens shooting as much as he likes and hardly uses any lighting equipment, thus placing himself firmly in the territory between documentary and fiction.

This retrospective comprises a series of feature films including titles such as A sangue (The Blood) (1989), Casa de lava (Down to Earth) (1994), Ossos (Bones) (1997), No cuarto de Vanda (In Vanda’s Room) (2000) for which he was awarded the Foreign Cineaste of the Year prize in France by the France Culture station; Onde jaz o teu sorriso? (Where Lies your Hidden Smile?) (2001) and Juventude em marcha (Colossal Youth), recognised as the best experimental film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association in 2007.

Pedro Costa (Lisbon, 1959) began to study history, but soon abandoned this subject to enter Lisbon’s School of Theatre and Cinema. Together with filmmakers such as Teresa Villaverde, Rita Azevedo and João Pedro Rodrigues, Costa is part of the so-called Fourth Generation. This group of Portuguese filmmakers began to work in the 1990s and their work is characterised by filming reality with no concessions whatsoever and approaching its most heartrending, marginal aspects. In 1985 he created a production company that eventually became a cooperative. A short time later, Portuguese public television commissioned the company to make short pieces for children, the context in which his first short film, Cartas a
Júlia (Letters to Julia) (1987) was made.