Mezzanine and Now Instant present the Los Angeles premiere of the restoration of Ana by the singular Portuguese husband-and-wife team António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro, a poet and a psychiatrist whose beautiful collaborations were a major influence on their contemporaries, including Manoel de Oliveira and their student Pedro Costa.

“Largely unknown outside Portugal, filmmakers António Reis (1927-1991) and Margarida Cordeiro (b. 1939) are legendary figures in their native country. Reis was a poet, a folklorist, and an ethnographer; Cordeiro, a psychiatrist by trade. Across the four films they made together, the duo forged a cinema of profound commitment, deeply rooted in the language, labors, myths, dreams, and material realities of a land and a people: namely, the peasants of Trás-os-Montes in Portugal’s remote Northeast. With one foot firmly anchored in the earth and the other in the cosmos, Reis and Cordeiro conjure up the deep, cyclical time of folk tradition. Their films are a collision of the forces of documentary and poetry, fact and fabulation, the ancient and the avant-garde, a vertigo of contradictions at once harmonious and sharply unreconciled. Employing simple and direct means, their work is all the more mystical for being so concrete. ‘Here and nowhere else. Here and anywhere else’—this is the paradoxical space-time of their films, in the words of Serge Daney."

Special thanks to Ed McCarry of Cinema Guild.

At the center of Ana—the second feature by António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro—is Ana, an elderly matriarch portrayed by Cordeiro’s own mother (Ana Maria Martins Guerra). She cares for her children and grandchildren in the far-off mountains of Trás-os-Montes in Portugal’s Northeast. As the children grow, we see the evolution of their inner life; meanwhile, Ana becomes sick and her imminent death looms. Through a series of non-linear scenes resembling reminiscences and rituals, with voiceovers adapted from poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Reis and Cordeiro link individual experience to the collective toils of people throughout the ages, and the collective to the earth and its history, all wrapped up in the cycles of life and death and renewal. Keyed to the resonances of small gestures, footsteps, and whispers, Ana sustains the hushed atmosphere of a chamber piece, even as it opens out to vast landscapes—and to eternity.  

Please note: seating is limited. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Guests may add their name to the standby list upon arrival. Online ticket sales will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime; at that time, any unclaimed seats will be released for in-store purchase on a first-come, first-served basis. All Sales Final.