Three by João Pedro Rodrigues
By turns playful, provocative, and committed to the pursuit of strange pleasures, the films of João Pedro Rodrigues have established the shapeshifting Portuguese director as a singular figure in contemporary queer cinema. The Lisbon-born filmmaker studied biology before embarking upon his directorial career, and his work is similarly fascinated by the body: as a locus of human desire; as a metaphor for his nation’s colonial history; as a site of personal and political transformation. Lose yourself in the dreamy, elliptical sensation of three of the director’s finest, most formally daring works, featuring libidinous trash collectors, Buñuelian bird buffs, and fully-frontal firefighters—a triptych of torrid yearning and twisted delight.
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Will-o'-the-Wisp
Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues | 67 mins | 2022
A queer musical fantasia unlike anything in recent cinema, Rodrigues’s 2069 love song finds an ailing monarch flashing back to his erotic youth as a fireman during a time of climate crisis, in which his beefcake blaze-battler (Mauro Costa) is tran... -
The Ornithologist
Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues | 113 mins | 2016
Loosely drawing upon his own life—his father had gifted him a pair of bird-watching binoculars as a child—Rodrigues conjures an ecstatic phantasmagoria about an avian peeper (erstwhile haute couture hunk Paul Hamy) who finds himself in a lusty re... -
O Fantasma
Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues | 87 mins | 2000
The rare film to be both feted by festival cognoscenti and uploaded to disreputable porn sites, Rodrigues’s confrontational, controversial debut feature heralded the arrival of a major queer artist. Concerning the carnal odyssey of a Lisbon trash ...
