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BLOOD
O Sangue
Portugal | 1990 | 99 min
Two brothers, a father burdened by anger and sorrow who abandons them, and an unrecognizable space, almost forsaken by man. Above everything, a secret that the two brothers carry around and will mark their life. The narrative of Pedro Costa’s ravishing debut revolves around all this. The titular blood is the one that is shed within a family. It is the metaphor of a bond, but above all of a hidden violence to be found less in visible gestures than in the atmosphere in which the film’s world is immersed. The black and white of the film stock cuts the spaces and envelopes the characters in a blanket of secrecy and mystery. The film’s truth lies here, in a real world pervaded by grief which is no longer capable of revealing itself fully but leaves instead its traces on the faces, silences, motionlessness of the bodies that dwell in it. It is the beginning of a journey that will leave a mark in the cinema of the great Portuguese director, in which the painful abstraction of form exposes an ever deeper and darker dimension of reality. (d.d.)