Acropolis Cinema
Bringing experimental, international, and undistributed films to Los Angeles
Casa de Lava (Dir. Pedro Costa, 1994)
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Date: November 07, 2017
Time: 8:00pm
Location: Downtown Independent
Address: 251 S. Main St, Los Angeles, CA. 90012
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New digital restoration! Los Angeles premiere!
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In only his second feature, Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa (Horse Money, In Vanda’s Room) brilliantly reworked Jacques Tourneur’s classic I Walked with a Zombie into a reflection on his country’s colonial legacy. A nurse, Mariana (Inês de Medeiros), accompanies Leão (Isaach de Bankolé) to his home on the volcanic islands of Cape Verde after an accident leaves him in a coma — but he goes unrecognized by fellow denizens, leaving Mariana trapped with and eventually entranced by a mysterious community. Never before released in the U.S. and now beautifully restored, Casa de Lava foreshadows the masterful films that would follow, yet is an extraordinary, ravishing work in its own right. (Grasshopper)
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An elliptical, deeply mysterious ghost story.
Akiva Gottlieb, The Nation
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New enigmas reveal themselves with each new viewing.
Jacques Rivette, Les Inrockuptibles
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A politically savvy homage to Jacques Tourneur. Costa creates moody, luminous tableaux to conjure an incantatory, Faulknerian earthiness.
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
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Casa de Lava may be the film of Costa’s that poses the most constant and furious tug of war in his oeuvre between Hollywood narrative and the portraiture of both places and people, staging an almost epic battle between the two.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Second Run DVD
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Comes at its viewers in a series of jagged scenes that shift unexpectedly from day to night and back, alternate between mundane stretches of daily business and blips of sudden, violent action, and often leave[s] [itself] open to the intrusion of new, eerier, more dreamlike tones.
Max Nelson, Public Books
