Fernando, a solitary ornithologist, is looking for black storks when he is swept away by the rapids. Rescued by a couple of Chinese pilgrims, he plunges into an eerie and dark forest, trying to get back on his track.
Young and handsome Sergio works the night shift as a trash collector in Lisbon, Portugal. He can't force himself to connect with his pretty female co-worker Fatima, who displays an avid ... See full summary »
Director:
João Pedro Rodrigues
Stars:
Ricardo Meneses,
Beatriz Torcato,
Andre Barbosa
Pedro and Rui kiss after a first-anniversary dinner; Pedro drives home, dying en route in a crash. Another pair of lovers, Odete and Alberto, split over her desire to have a child. Pedro ... See full summary »
Director:
João Pedro Rodrigues
Stars:
Ana Cristina de Oliveira,
Nuno Gil,
João Carreira
Two filmmakers leave to Macao in an adventure of discovery of a city-labyrinth, multicultural and mysterious, where the memories of the childhood - featured memories by the lived reality in... See full summary »
Directors:
João Pedro Rodrigues,
João Rui Guerra da Mata
Stars:
Lydie Barbara,
João Rui Guerra da Mata,
João Pedro Rodrigues
Upon returning from a hunting expedition, King Louis XIV feels a sharp pain in his leg. He begins to die, surrounded by loyal followers in the royal chambers.
Director:
Albert Serra
Stars:
Jean-Pierre Léaud,
Patrick d'Assumçao,
Marc Susini
Members of the advocacy group ACT UP Paris demand action by the government and pharmaceutical companies to combat the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s.
Spring. Yorkshire. Young farmer Johnny Saxby numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex, until the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker for lambing season ignites an intense relationship that sets Johnny on a new path.
Fernando, a solitary ornithologist, is looking for black storks when he is swept away by the rapids. Rescued by a couple of Chinese pilgrims, he plunges into an eerie and dark forest, trying to get back on his track.
The Portuguese ornithologist is probably exploring Iberian Peninsula as its Black Storks' central southwest habitat, where they breed and roost. As of 2006, their population in Spain and Portugal appears to be increasing estimating their population at 405 to 483. See more »
Soundtracks
Canção do Engate
Performed by António Variações See more »
A staunch queer cinema visionary and nonconformist, Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues' fifth feature beguilingly takes a leap of faith onto a religious theme, a pilgrimage to Saint Anthony of Padua, conspicuously transcribing its story into the existential trials and tribulations of our titular ornithologist Fernando (Hamy), which is also St. Anthony's birth name, stranded in a modern-day Portuguese waterway and forests.
Fernando, an atheist from the word go, embarks on his stork-scouting journey with gusto and alacrity, and the implication that it is not his first sortie in the area makes his adventure quite up his alley. Few background information is purveyed, other than he is under medication and has a male lover who is caring for him. Contrasting Fernando's bird-watching/telescopic angle with different bird's-eye views, it is the modus operandi brings home a numinous frisson of watching and simultaneously being watched, literally sublimates the nature's gaze with a plethora of wild feathered friends hovering around incessantly through the film. When Fernando's kayak is upset during the rapids, the story starts to take shape into a multi-layered religious mythology through Fernando's various real/surreal encounters, garnished with sexual innuendos (undressed and tied- up by two young Chinese female God-bothers, a sadomasochistic position enticing one's fantasy; the urolagnia experience in the darkness among a contingent of masqueraded roarers), and an in- the-buff dalliance with a deaf-mute shepherd boy named Jesus (Cagiao), which ends in manslaughter, a startling incident but concocted with blasé wantonness.
Conceivably, when one liquidates Jesus, there is nothing but a road to redemption beckons him, Fernando must carry on his mythical transmogrification into a pious St. Antony by dint of his self- inflicted ritual for absolution (that is where symbolic tunnel, tableaux vivants and inscrutable gestures abound), consummated by being dispatched by the alter ego of Jesus, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, if credits must be given to Rodrigues' wheeze of contemplating a grand mythos within an entrancing temporal sphere, his didactic exegesis is less a merit to be reckoned with.
Leading actor Paul Hamy credibly shoulders on a role which requires boldness and physical exertion, instils his open-faced earthiness into the overlaying mystique and alone-in-the-woods background, which successfully retains Fernando in the cynosure, even when narrative longueur inevitably lurks. Tellingly, the film renders a captivating landscape to those eyes yearning for natural's majestic design, whether it is the picturesque on the surface or the uncanny residing in the deep, also the foley artists (Nuno Carvalho and Martin Delzescaux) ply their own distinctive aural intrusion to that latter effect: eerie, preternatural and strident. In the end of the day, THE ORNITHOLOGIST is another contrived fable trying to mythicize religion in order to elicit a sense of meta-sanctity of our own existence, but the fruition thuddingly slumps between artsy-fartsy and nonplussing, on top of that, where are the storks, anyway?
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A staunch queer cinema visionary and nonconformist, Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues' fifth feature beguilingly takes a leap of faith onto a religious theme, a pilgrimage to Saint Anthony of Padua, conspicuously transcribing its story into the existential trials and tribulations of our titular ornithologist Fernando (Hamy), which is also St. Anthony's birth name, stranded in a modern-day Portuguese waterway and forests.
Fernando, an atheist from the word go, embarks on his stork-scouting journey with gusto and alacrity, and the implication that it is not his first sortie in the area makes his adventure quite up his alley. Few background information is purveyed, other than he is under medication and has a male lover who is caring for him. Contrasting Fernando's bird-watching/telescopic angle with different bird's-eye views, it is the modus operandi brings home a numinous frisson of watching and simultaneously being watched, literally sublimates the nature's gaze with a plethora of wild feathered friends hovering around incessantly through the film. When Fernando's kayak is upset during the rapids, the story starts to take shape into a multi-layered religious mythology through Fernando's various real/surreal encounters, garnished with sexual innuendos (undressed and tied- up by two young Chinese female God-bothers, a sadomasochistic position enticing one's fantasy; the urolagnia experience in the darkness among a contingent of masqueraded roarers), and an in- the-buff dalliance with a deaf-mute shepherd boy named Jesus (Cagiao), which ends in manslaughter, a startling incident but concocted with blasé wantonness.
Conceivably, when one liquidates Jesus, there is nothing but a road to redemption beckons him, Fernando must carry on his mythical transmogrification into a pious St. Antony by dint of his self- inflicted ritual for absolution (that is where symbolic tunnel, tableaux vivants and inscrutable gestures abound), consummated by being dispatched by the alter ego of Jesus, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, if credits must be given to Rodrigues' wheeze of contemplating a grand mythos within an entrancing temporal sphere, his didactic exegesis is less a merit to be reckoned with.
Leading actor Paul Hamy credibly shoulders on a role which requires boldness and physical exertion, instils his open-faced earthiness into the overlaying mystique and alone-in-the-woods background, which successfully retains Fernando in the cynosure, even when narrative longueur inevitably lurks. Tellingly, the film renders a captivating landscape to those eyes yearning for natural's majestic design, whether it is the picturesque on the surface or the uncanny residing in the deep, also the foley artists (Nuno Carvalho and Martin Delzescaux) ply their own distinctive aural intrusion to that latter effect: eerie, preternatural and strident. In the end of the day, THE ORNITHOLOGIST is another contrived fable trying to mythicize religion in order to elicit a sense of meta-sanctity of our own existence, but the fruition thuddingly slumps between artsy-fartsy and nonplussing, on top of that, where are the storks, anyway?