O riso e a faca

With its three-and-a-half-hour runtime and a narrative centred on a Portuguese engineer sent to Guinea-Bissau to assess how a road project might impact local communities, Pedro Pinho’s O RISO E A FACA doesn’t lend itself to easy descriptors. Digressive, expansive, polyphonic—all these terms are accurate, yet inherently insufficient when attempting to frame the neocolonial mechanics the film seeks to expose and of which it, indirectly, also forms a part. Mirroring his curious, affable, yet increasingly sceptical protagonist Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem), Pinho is never shy to wander off course, to dwell in liminal situations where the boundary between fiction and documentary blurs—whether through Sérgio’s encounters with village inhabitants, lengthy discussions about Western civilisation and capitalism, or evenings spent alongside his friends Diára (Cleo Diára) and Giu (Jonathan Guilherme) within the local queer community. Marked by a self-aware, almost self-effacing narrative, O RISO E A FACA is a film made in an exploratory mode, one that resists completion and resolution in its critique. Pinho is fully aware that the desire to understand—a person, a community, or a country—always carries with it a degree of violence. (Öykü Sofuoğlu)

Pedro Pinho: 6 MINUTOS (2001, K), FELIZ ANIVERSÁRIO (2004, K), PERTO (2004, K), NO INÍCIO (2005, K), BAB SEBTA (2008), UM FIM DO MUNDO (2013), CIDADES E AS TROCAS (2014, KO-REGIE), A FÁBRICA DE NADA (2017), CIDADE (2017, CO-DIRECTOR)