Edgar Pêra (1960) is a Portuguese filmmaker. He writes occasionally fiction and essays and is also a graphic comics artist. Considered “the most persistently individualistic Portuguese filmmaker”, Edgar Pêra has done more than one hundred films for cinema, TV, theatre dance, cine-concerts, galleries, internet and other media. Pêra started as a screenwriter but in 1985 bought a camera, inspired by Dziga Vertov, and never stopped shooting on a daily basis. The first phase of Edgar Pêra’s work started in 1985 when he was shooting his kino-diaries (mostly with rock bands and neuropunks). It reached its acme in 1991 with The City of Cassiano. Pêra’s first feature, Manual of Evasion LX94 was described as “Portuguese thought-provoking experimental movie with a great potential for cult status.” Pêra invited three major counterculture American writers: Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Rudy Rucker and asked them about the nature of time. In 1996 he founded, with writer Manuel Rodrigues, Akademia Luzoh-Galaktica, a trans-media working space. During that time he produced and directed several films made with students and took four years to edit his feature, The Window (Don Juan Mix), premiered at the Locarno Festival in 2001. From then there’s change in Pêra’s work, inflecting towards a more emotional cinema, but keeping the emphasis in trans-realist aesthetics and eccentric humor. In 2011 Pêra started shooting in 3D format. Besides his 3D kino-diaries, some of his 3D films are: Cinesapens, Stillness, Lisbon Revisited, The Cavern. His last retrospective was in Seoul, and his last 3D feature The Amazed Spectator premiered in the Rotterdam IFFR, 2016.
2016-04-17
