Teresa Villaverde, Portuguese director born in 1966 in Lisbon worked with João César Monteiro, José Álvaro Morais and João Canijo before beginning her filmmaking career in the early nineties, always writing the scripts for her films that have always had world premieres at festivals such as Cannes, Berlin and Venice.
This week begins, at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the highlight of the director's work, which features a retrospective of 15 of her films, a masterclass and the premiere of a short film funded by Center, entitled Où en êtes-vous, Teresa Villaverde ?. This film joins the collection of other films that were born from this invitation from the Center to make a free format film that answers the question posed taking into account the retrospective of the artists’ work and its future. Directors such as João Pedro Rodrigues, Jean-Marie Straub, Naomi Kawase, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Richard Linklater, Jafar Panahi, Christian Petzold, among others are also part of this collection that now houses Teresa Villaverde.
The integral begins with the film with which she premiered, the feature film of 1991, A Idade Maior, a film that revolves around a family marked by the realities of the Colonial War and ends with Colo, premiered in 2017 at the Berlinale. The last, a film full of growing tension that never breaks out where a family tries to deal with the repercussions and unexpected consequences of the common path of today's European societies. The retrospective also includes Galileo's Thermometer, a 2018 documentary about Italian filmmaker Tonino de Bernardi.
The short film that was born from this retrospective led the director to film the anxiety at the Mangueira Samba School, Rio de Janeiro, pending the decision of the juries of who would be the 2019 Carnival champion. The school's celebrations and awarded samba were made in honor of those oppressed, who resist against the current situation in Brazil. The invitation made to the Portuguese filmmaker is part of the tradition of the Pompidou Center showing in all its seasons, directors coming from various parts of the world and their works.
“There is a very strong pictorial culture and her films show her interest in all the arts. She is a global artist who gives us her vision of society and the world in which we live. We always want to have a director who tells stories through the cinema, but we also want an artist to give us a perspective on contemporary cinema", said Amélie Galli, programmer at the Parisian museum.
The retrospective runs from June 14th to July 1st and is attended by the director.
[12/06/2019]