Reviews
"Chistmas Inventory"
"Inventory of Christmas" by Miguel Gomes is possibly about one of the
best and more intelligent short films that have been made in the last
years. Intelligent, for the form as it generates a
personal and a collective memory in what it concerns to Christmas, and as it converts it into an eminently cinematographic
object.
In this case, intelligence does not mean coldness and
intellectual awareness (that afected Miguel Gomes first short film), but understanding and a certain
tenderness for what it films, and passion for the cinema, that the
handling shows in the camera movements and shots of great beauty
and austerity that give to the inanimate objects a strong poetical weight. A word more to detach the work of someone who starts already to be seen
as the great director of photography of the future, Rui Poças,
here with a magnificent work in the application of colors, to
evoke the glorious times of technicolor, in the films of Minnelli (Meet me at St
Louis, that Inventory of Christmas almost evokes), Michael Powell (the Thief of
Bagdad) and DeMille (Samson
and Delilah) and its directors of photography : George Folsey, George
Perinal and George Barnes."
Manuel Cintra Ferreira in "Expresso" 23 Dec.2000
The Phantom
"Lisbon on this film is unrecognizable: gates, walls and other barriers of the new avenues, neighbourhood usually moved away from film cameras - Film has preferred the "old Lisbon" or the city surrounds. Still, the notable and risky cinamatography work by Rui Poças, made in a lonely way and almost in darkness."
in " Público" 7 Set.2000
(...)" a truly " romantic " history (the quotation marks are obligatory), where the sex scenes are so raw and animal that it stands out even more the love absence, for which one can go crazy. J.P.Rodrigues is owner of an extraordinary film writing, helped by the somber cinematography of Rui Poças.
Gianluigi Lanza in "La Manica Tagliata" Out.2000
"The great challenge of this film - and the immense risk that it implies is already a virtue - is to show, without censures nor limits, a body and its imaginary. In cinema.
Because it is cinema what it is about, as it demonstrates the coherence of the aesthetic and formal options of the author.
See the severity of the shots, that transforms many pictures of this film into plastic autonomous pictures, with a composition and an acurate reading of the space.
See the cinematography - surely polemic - for times in the edge of the invisibility, between sleep, the dream and the
vigil, locking up the film in a permanent and suffocating night from where one can
never leave.
See the drawing of the protagonist body , whose contours are worked, drawn and redesigned until exhaustion, with an almost maniac stubbornness, culminating in the latex dressed scenes, with an intensity almost purely pictorial " (...)
Alexandre Melo in "O Independente"
Out.2000
" Rui Poças cinematography is of a monochromatic somberness that
torments and saddens. In Venice, about this film,
associations with Genet and Fassbinder had been made."
Vincenzo Mazzaccaro in "Cinema Studio" Out.2000
"...the most beautiful fires in the modern romantic night since it burns cinema."
Olivier Séguret in "Libération" Mar 2001
Awards
"Meanwhile" - Best Cinematography Prize
Festival Internacional de Curtas Metragens de Vila do Conde. Portugal
feature films • short films • documentaries • filmography and resume • contact me
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