On Wednesdays in January, the Dryden Theatre will present a five-feature retrospective of one of the world’s most acclaimed filmmakers: Portuguese director Pedro Costa. Since his debut with 1989’s The Blood (screening January 2), Costa’s work has been increasingly admired and championed by film critics, programmers, cineastes, and cinephiles around the world. Rarely screened in the US, you’ll now have an opportunity to discover this truly cutting-edge filmmaker for yourself.

Costa focuses on places and individuals existing on the outer fringes of society, particularly citizens of Cape Verde, a colonial republic of Portugal from 1460 to 1975. For Casa de Lava, a haunting story about a mysterious culture (January 9), Costa filmed on location in the Cape Verde Islands; and for his highly praised, loosely connected trilogy—Bones (January 16), In Vanda’s Room (January 23), and Colossal Youth (January 30)—Costa’s camera visited Cape Verdean immigrants housed in the slums and projects of Lisbon.

Taking a determinedly humanist perspective and lighting style frequently compared to the Dutch painter Vermeer, Costa favors long takes for his non-professional cast members to deliver their own vivid and powerful monologues on life, love, and loss. Leisurely paced and decidedly non-traditional, Costa’s films demand an audience’s attention, but like the work of other film artists to whom he’s been compared—Bresson, Antonioni, Ozu—these strangely beautiful movies deliver an emotional power unlike anything else in the cinema for the open-minded viewer.

Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department

Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa was organized by Ricardo Matos Cabo, Lisbon; Instituto de Cinema e Audiovisual; Cinemateca Portuguesa-Museu do Cinema; João Bénard da Costa; Instituto Camões.