Edgar Pêra

The first phase of Edgar Pêra's work started in 1984, shooting Portuguese rock bands in a neo-realist style, and reached its acme with A Cidade de Cassiano / The City of Cassiano (1991). He directed his first feature in 1994, the cult movie Manual de Evasão LX 94 / Manual of Evasion (during Lisbon 1994 Capital of Culture), articulating an aesthetic legacy of soviet silent film, with a neuro-punk way of creating and capturing instantaneous reality. Pêra invited three major counterculture American writers, Terence Mckenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Rudy Rucker, and asked them about the nature of time. A Janela (Maryalva Mix) / The Window (Don Juan Mix), premiered at the Locarno Festival in 2001. In 2006 Edgar Pêra had a major retrospective at Indie Lisboa where Movimentos Perpétuos / Perpetual Movements was also shown, and won awards in almost every category. In Paris he won the Pasolini Award for his career, along with Alejandro Jodorowsky, Agnes B. and Fernando Arrabal. O Barão / The Baron, a neo-gothic feature, premiered in 2011 at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Over the past three years Pêra directed several short films, independent documentaries about Madredeus and other Portuguese bands, based on his personal archives, and started to experiment in the 3D format. Pêra's last film, Cinespiens, is a segment of 3X3D, an anthology 3D feature with 2 other films by Jean-Luc Godard and Peter Greenaway.