Three by António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro - L.A. premieres of new restorations!
We are honored to present the Los Angeles premieres of three restored films by the singular Portuguese husband-and-wife team António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro.
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Jun 09, 2026, 7:00 PM
Now Instant Image Hall, 939 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles, CA 90012, USA
Three by António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro - L.A. premieres of new restorations!
June 9th - 11th
Now Instant Image Hall
99 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
We are honored to present three L.A. premiere restorations by the singular Portuguese husband-and-wife team António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro, a poet and a psychiatrist whose beautiful collaborations were a major influence on their contemporaries, including Manoel de Oliveira and their student Pedro Costa.
“Largely unknown outside Portugal, filmmakers António Reis (1927-1991) and Margarida Cordeiro (b. 1939) are legendary figures in their native country. Reis was a poet, a folklorist, and an ethnographer; Cordeiro, a psychiatrist by trade. Across the four films they made together, the duo forged a cinema of profound commitment, deeply rooted in the language, labors, myths, dreams, and material realities of a land and a people: namely, the peasants of Trás-os-Montes in Portugal’s remote Northeast. With one foot firmly anchored in the earth and the other in the cosmos, Reis and Cordeiro conjure up the deep, cyclical time of folk tradition. Their films are a collision of the forces of documentary and poetry, fact and fabulation, the ancient and the avant-garde, a vertigo of contradictions at once harmonious and sharply unreconciled. Employing simple and direct means, their work is all the more mystical for being so concrete. ‘Here and nowhere else. Here and anywhere else’—this is the paradoxical space-time of their films, in the words of Serge Daney.
Emerging in the years after the Carnation Revolution of 1974, their poetic-ethnographic filmmaking permanently shook the foundations of Portuguese cinema. It was a formative influence on Pedro Costa, for one: “I had a teacher, António Reis, who believed in stones, in nature. He was a pantheist. He was an animal.” A cult of Reis and Cordeiro has persisted through time, however clandestinely, with contemporaries like Jacques Rivette, Marguerite Duras, João César Monteiro, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Robert Kramer, Jean Rouch, and Joris Ivens all counted among their admirers. Today, these works endure as hieroglyphs of an entirely new ethic and aesthetic of film.” -The Theater of the Matters
Special thanks to Ed McCarry (Cinema Guild) and Joana de Sousa (Cinemateca Portuguesa - Museu do Cinema).
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Trás-os-Montes
a film by António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro
1976, Portugal, 111, DCP
L.A. premiere of a brand-new 2K restoration
Tuesday, June 9th
Now Instant Image Hall
99 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
doors: 6:30
film: 7:00
“[The film that] reconciled me with my country and my language.” -Pedro Costa
“A film of long shadows and smoke in twilight, Trás-os-Montes is an intensive labor of recollection, an epic of a land and a way of life on the edge of oblivion, and a major turning point in the history of Portuguese cinema. In 1974, filmmakers António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro traveled ten thousand kilometers across the isolated, near-mythical region in the Northeast of Portugal known as Trás-os-Montes. They recruited a cast of inhabitants old and young from local villages to materialize their histories, legends, dreams, and nightmares for the camera. The philosophy of the peasants, their rebellion, their everyday existence far from the laws of church and state, and their closeness to ancient things—these encounters informed the dialectical approach of the film, where fiction and reality, past and future swell in an immediate present. The result is a work of deep and threatened lyricism. In voiceover, Reis and Cordeiro adapt passages from Kafka and the Chinese poet Po Chü-i, translated to the guttural subdialect of the Northeast. As an act of solidarity with a people facing extinction, Trás-os-Montes echoes through time.” -Cinema Guild
In Portuguese with English subtitles. A Cinema Guild release.
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Ana
a film by António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro
1982, Portugal, 115m, DCP
L.A. premiere of a brand-new 4K restoration
Wednesday, June 10th
Now Instant Image Hall
99 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
doors: 6:30
film: 7:00
”At the center of Ana—the second feature by António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro—is Ana, an elderly matriarch portrayed by Cordeiro’s own mother (Ana Maria Martins Guerra). She cares for her children and grandchildren in the far-off mountains of Trás-os-Montes in Portugal’s Northeast. As the children grow, we see the evolution of their inner life; meanwhile, Ana becomes sick and her imminent death looms. Through a series of non-linear scenes resembling reminiscences and rituals, with voiceovers adapted from poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Reis and Cordeiro link individual experience to the collective toils of people throughout the ages, and the collective to the earth and its history, all wrapped up in the cycles of life and death and renewal. Keyed to the resonances of small gestures, footsteps, and whispers, Ana sustains the hushed atmosphere of a chamber piece, even as it opens out to vast landscapes—and to eternity.” -Cinema Guild
In Portuguese with English subtitles. A Cinema Guild release. Special thanks to Edward McCarry.
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Rosa de Areia
a film by António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro
1989, Portugal, 88m, DCP
L.A. premiere of a brand-new 4K restoration
Thursday, June 11th
Now Instant Image Hall
99 Chung King Rd, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
doors: 6:30
film: 7:00
“António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s final film, Rosa de Areia, is their most unclassifiable endeavor. The film is a work of sensuous abstraction performed in the open air of Trás-os-Montes, the remote region in Portugal’s Northeast which was a site of lifelong inspiration for the duo. In a series of ritualistic, highly elaborate sequence shots, as elusive and exquisite as the “desert rose” of the film’s title, Reis and Cordeiro spin a cosmic tale of nature and the human condition, drawing on a diverse range of texts ranging from Michel de Montaigne to Carl Sagan. In Cordeiro’s words, ‘Rosa de Areia is a film for those who can see and listen as if for the first time; as if it was the first film that came from the earth and spoke about it.’” -Cinema Guild
In Portuguese with English subtitles. A Cinema Guild release.