August 7-13, 2020
The Green Years (Dir. Paulo Rocha, 1963)
From August 7-13, The Green Years will be available to stream via Acropolis Cinema and Grasshopper Film. Acropolis will receive 50% of all revenue. Click here to rent.
If you'd like to offer additional support, you can make a tax deductible donation to Acropolis by clicking here.
New digital restoration supervised by Pedro Costa!
Nineteen-year-old Julio heads to Lisbon from the provinces and gets a job as a shoemaker for his uncle Raul. But when he meets Ilda, a confident young housemaid who becomes a regular shop visitor, his working-class values collide with the bourgeois trappings of modern life. Never before released in the U.S., Rocha’s debut film, gloriously shot in black and white, is an extraordinary and haunting coming-of-age film. Winner of Best First Film at the 1964 Locarno Film Festival.
A groundbreaking film.
Alexandra Gandra, Taste of Cinema
The founding mark of the so-called New Portuguese Cinema.
Paulo Granja, Paulo Rocha's Os Verde Anos and the New Portuguese Cinema
Paulo Rocha’s films are among the most beautiful, exquisite and generous gifts of the Portuguese cinema.
Boris Nelepo, MUBI Notebook
The first film of a new generation. Striking in its context and rich in the modernity of its processes, its content, and its mastery of filmmaking. The Green Years has revealed the very particular genius of this new director.
Manoel de Oliveira
I watched [The Green Years] on television...because of my parents’ influence—especially my father’s—and from the film I obviously remembered Isabel Ruth, who I consider a type of Portuguese Anna Karina, the most beautiful girl in Portuguese cinema.
Pedro Costa, Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema
August 14-20, 2020
Change of Life (Dir. Paulo Rocha, 1966)
From August 14-20, Change of Life will be available to stream via Acropolis Cinema and Grasshopper Film. Acropolis will receive 50% of all revenue.
If you'd like to offer additional support, you can make a tax deductible donation to Acropolis by clicking here.
New digital restoration supervised by Pedro Costa!
Paulo Rocha’s haunting second feature, Change of Life, tells the beautiful and deeply felt story of a young man, a veteran from the war in Angola, who returns home to his remote fishing village to discover that his former sweetheart is now married to his brother. Inspired by his work with Maneol de Oliveira, Rocha “cast” the local villagers as themselves, interspersed with experienced actors led by the great Isabel Ruth who would go onto become an Oliveira regular and an iconic presence in Pedro Costa’s Ossos (Bones). The poetry of the local vernacular is captured in the textured dialogue written by fellow Portuguese filmmaker Antonio Reis who met Rocha through Oliveira. The film was a critical and commercial success upon release, though it would effectively be the last film that Rocha would make for nearly two decades.
Remarkable... goes a long way towards capturing Portuguese daily life in a time when censorship was rife.
Colette de Castro, Frameland
Crucial for Portuguese film history [and a] unique film in Rocha’s career... captures the difficult conditions in which the fishermen community of Furadouro lived.
Daniel Ribas, Porto/Post/Doc
[Rocha's] gestures, colors, ideas (like someone floating above the earth, or a way of introducing a song) can be seen in the works of João Pedro Rodrigues, Rita Azevedo Gomes, and Pedro Costa.
Lucía Salas, Kinoscope
This illusionless movie with a strong sense of nature has become a classic of Portuguese cinema. The impact of Change of Life can now, for example, be witnessed in the works of a newer master, Pedro Costa.
Lauri Timonen, Midnight Sun Film Festival
[An] influential masterpiece of poetic neo-realism...crystallizes a major theme anchoring [the] encounter staged between Portuguese cinema and the cinema of the world: the all too often unrealized potential of cinema to critique and, moreover, to reinvent the image and imagination of a nation.
Haden Guest, MUBI Notebook
August 28 - September 3, 2020
Ghost Tropic (Dir. Bas Devos, 2019)
From August 28 - September 3, Ghost Tropic will be available to stream via Acropolis Cinema and Grasshopper Film. Acropolis will receive 50% of all revenue.
If you'd like to offer additional support, you can make a tax deductible donation to Acropolis by clicking here.
Ghost Tropic follows Khadija (Saadia Bentaïeb), a fifty-eight-year-old Maghrebi cleaning woman living in Brussels in the wake of the 2016 bombings that shook the city. After work one night, she falls asleep on the last subway train, wakes up at the end of the line and has no choice but to make her way home—all the way across the city—on foot. Along the way, she has a series of encounters: with a security guard, a convenience store clerk, a group of teenagers. She asks for help and she gives it and slowly, steadily makes her way.
Director Bas Devos’s lightness of touch combines with the richness of Grimm Vanderkerckhove’s 16mm images to create a small wonder of humanistic storytelling. Ghost Tropic is a testament to the everyday drama of immigrant life and insists on the possibility of goodness and beauty, even in the dark of night.
A film as gentle, sad and empathetic as an Edward Hopper painting.
David Perrin, MUBI Notebook
Saadia Bentaïeb’s performance is a gem of minute gradations—every look, pause and reaction matters.
Tim Grierson, Screen Daily
Gorgeous… A witching hour-and-a-half that unfurls as gradually and un-threateningly as the sky lights up during dawn.
Ben Driscoll, Sight & Sound
A compressed epic… This poetic Belgian feature manages to say a good deal about life, death, and the state of the globalized world.
Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader
Stunning... A delicate miniature that’s magnificently humanist, occasionally amusing and shot in a palette of rich, saturated nighttime hues.
Boyd van Hoeij, The Hollywood Reporter