Filipa César
Filipa César
An artist and filmmaker, Filipa César (Porto, 1975) is interested in the porous boundaries between the moving image and its reception, exploring the fictional dimensions of the documentary and the economy, politics, and poetics of cinematic practices. A large number of her films are focused on the ghosts of resistance that lie at the center of Portugal's geopolitical history. Through the creation of performance spaces she proposes a subjective approach to knowledge and questions the production mechanisms of epic national tales, such as the erasure of events concerning minority populations. Since 2011 she has made several films that use as a matrix the first steps of resistance and liberation cinema in Guinea Bissau, such as the fragments of a lost heritage for which she endeavors to resuscitate its potential via a process of collective research (“Luta ca caba inda”, “The Struggle is not yet over”). In 2017, “Spell Reel”, her first feature-length film, which follows this adventure, was presented in a world premiere at the Berlinale (Forum), and then in nearly twenty festivals and museums around the world, receiving many prizes. With “Sunstone”, (2018), directed in collaboration with Louis Henderson, she explores a cinema that interrogates the visual technologies of power and the materiality of observation, in the spirit of the works of Harun Farocki.