Two films previously featured in the French Cannes festival selection, where actress Cleo Diará won the Best Actress award in the Un Certain Regard section for her role in Pedro Pinho’s work.
The festival program also includes ‘Agente Secreto’ by Brazilian director Kléber Mendonça Filho, the world premiere of Bradley Cooper’s ‘Is This Thing On?’, and the U.S. premiere of Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’, along with other new works from Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel, France’s Claire Denis, and South Korea’s Park Chan-wook.
Galego Óliver Laxe will also be in New York with ‘Sirat’.
‘O Riso e a Faca’, a coproduction between Portugal, Brazil, France, and Romania, follows the story of Sérgio, a Portuguese environmental engineer working for an NGO in Africa on a road project between the desert and the jungle.
‘O Riso e a Faca’ is Pedro Pinho’s second fiction feature, following ‘A Fábrica do Nada’, which also premiered in Cannes in 2017, where it received the Fipresci Prize.
‘Magalhães’, directed by Filipino Lav Diaz and coproduced by Portugal’s Rosa Filmes, was filmed in Portugal and Spain.
Mexican actor Gael García Bernal stars as the Portuguese navigator Fernão de Magalhães (1480-1521), who embarked on the circumnavigation journey and died in the Philippines.
In early April, before Cannes’ program announcement, Lav Diaz told publications Deadline and Screen Daily that ‘Magalhães’ was a project he had been working on for several years, anticipated to be around nine hours long, but a shorter version will be shown at the festival. In New York, the film is expected to run for 160 minutes.
The New York festival, which does not award prizes, is now in its 63rd edition and takes place from September 26 to October 13.
TDI (SS) // MAG
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