Restoration of BLOOD, a film by Pedro Costa
Portugal, 1989 | 98' | 4K restoration | B&W
A provincial land. Christmas, year's end. Two brothers. One is 17 years old, the other 10. They swear to keep a secret. It has to do with their father's frequent absence. One girl is let in on the secret by the older brother. This time the father isn't absent like usual. What happened? Only Vicente and Clara know. Secrets, promises, separations, expectations. By dint of surviving their secret the two brothers go lost. Perhaps this film is about childhood's night.
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With: Pedro Hestnes, Nuno Ferreira, Inês de Medeiros, Luís Miguel Cintra, Canto e castro, Isabel de Castro, Henrique Viana, Luís Santos, Manuel João Vieira
Direction and Script Pedro Costa Image Martin Schäfer Editing Manuela Viegas Sound Pedro Caldas Gerard Rousseau Direction of Production Victor Gonçalves
Production Trópico Filmes
4k scan from the original 35mm negative and original monaural optical and magnetic sound elements 35mm footage conserved at the Cinemateca Portuguesa, Museu do Cinema / ANIM.
Negative 4K scan on wet gate Oxberry-Cineric scanner and audio recording supervised by Franco Bosco at ANIM.
Digital grading and image restoration supervised by Carlos Almeida at IrmaLucia Efeitos Especiais, Lisbon
Colorist: Gonçalo Ferreira Image Restoration: André Constantino, Ana Cunha
Uncompressed monaural soundtrack supervised by Hugo Leitão at Estúdio Espreita o Som, Lisbon.
Image and sound restorations approved by the director
Special thanks to José Manuel Costa, Rui Machado – Cinemateca Portuguesa, Museu do Cinema / ANIM
Support: ICA — Ad-HOC
"Admirers of Pedro Costa's more recent work are often thrown for a thrilling loop by the glossy, liquid textures and lush atmospherics of the director's first feature, a beguiling fairytale about the trials endured by two brothers in the wake of their father's violent death. Costa , who was barely 30 when Blood premiered, had spent the seven years leading up to its production immersing himself in the films of Fritz Lang, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tourneur, and Nicholas Ray. slap to the face, is never less than a bracingly original stream of images and impressions: a nocturnal journey through a brittle forest; a burst of fireworks seen from the balcony of a ghostly hotel; a glittering fairground dream scored to a rhapsodic pop song. "O Sangue," Costa said in a 2006 interview, "was also the beginning of my love—maybe love is the wrong word—for domestic cinema. A kind of cinema that shows how people live." (New York Film Festival)
