Rebecca Fons is always excited to get a call from the Block Cinema team. Fons is Director of Programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and usually calls from either of Block Cinema’s co-programmers foreshadow exciting collaborations; in 2022, they anticipated Tsai Ming-liang’s visit to The Block and artist talk plus screening series at the Film Center, and in 2023 they heralded a series of screening-slash-Q&A’s at both venues. In short, calls from Block cinema always spell good news – and the potential for exciting collaboration.  

Most recently, the call was to share that Pedro Costa – the internationally renowned Portuguese auteur whose work, Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote, is “populated not so much by characters in the literary sense as by raw essences — souls, if you will” – would be coming to Chicago for a brief residency at Northwestern University. Costa comes to Northwestern as a 2024 Hoffman Visiting Artist for Documentary Media, a short-term filmmaker residency program at the university’s School of Communication, and the constellation of citywide programming that emerged from his residency is just the latest exemplar of Chicago film exhibitors’ eagerness for partnership.  

“I think it’s just a testament that when we have the greats coming to the city, we as film curators and film exhibitors really want to share the love,” Fons said. “We recognize what a great opportunity it is for us to kind of diversify the visit that they have in Chicago, not only so that more audiences can connect with these artists, but also so that we can show our city off.” 

Public events during the filmmaker’s week in Chicago span three decades, three venues, and three distinct modes of filmmaking:  

On Wednesday, April 24^th at 5:30 PM, Block Cinema presents Costa’s 2000 pivot away from fiction, 35mm, and traditional production methods: the digital cinema landmark In Vanda’s Room, which sees the director working with space, duration, light and shadow, and nonactors to shape the nonfiction film into an evocative portrait of a marginalized community unlike anything before or after it. On Friday, April 26^th at 6 PM, Block Cinema pairs – as per the filmmaker’s request – his subtly romantic, observational portrait of artists at work Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001), chronicling his mentors Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s re-editing of their 1999 film Sicilia!, with its filmic subject, Sicilia!, on 35mm.  

“To be able to pair that with Sicilia! on a 35mm print is one of my absolute dream programs,” said Malia Haines-Stewart, Block Cinema’s Associate Film Programmer. “It’s something that I was fortunate to see as a student when I was an undergrad and it really changed the way that I thought about cinema.” 

On Thursday, April 25th at 6 PM fire meets fire at the Gene Siskel Film Center with a short-and-a-feature pairing of Costa’s latest work The Daughters of Fire (2023), an experimental short inspired by a 1951 volcanic eruption on Cape Verde, with an early fiction work, Casa de Lava (1994), a loose remake of Jacques Tourneur’s Val Lewton-produced horror fantasy I Walked with a Zombie (1943) about a Portuguese nurse accompanying a comatose immigrant worker back to the Cape Verde islands. 

Revisiting Casa de Lava nods at the genre underpinnings of Costa’s early work, Haines-Stewart said.  

“It’s a nod to Pedro Costa’s deep, cinephilic love of filmmakers like Tourneur,” she said. “It’s really interesting when you might not expect to see those kinds of Classical Hollywood references and that kind of influence in Costa’s work.” 

Rounding out the director’s time in Chicago is Music Box Theatre’s presentation of Horse Money (2014), which showcases the docufiction register of the filmmaker’s more contemporary work, Saturday, April 27^th at 2PM. 

Costa will be in attendance at each of the four programs. At Gene Siskel Film Center, he’ll participate in a post-screening conversation with Melika Bass, filmmaker and associate prof in Film Video, New Media, and Animation at SAIC. At Music Box Theatre, film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum will moderate a post-film Q&A. And at Block Cinema, Haines-Stewart, Michael Metzger, Block Museum Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts, and Chicago International Film Festival Programmer Sam Flancher will moderate conversations between filmmaker and audience.  

“This was a great opportunity for us to collaborate with the university and give our audience an opportunity to meet a world-class filmmaker, and we’re just as excited to welcome Pedro,” said Brian Andreotti, Music Box Theatre Director of Programming.  

Programmers at each theater were ecstatic at the chance to show films by such a legend of contemporary cinema, but also eager to work together to offer Chicagoland filmgoers a wide sampling of his work – in style, content, and venue location. 

“We were immediately aware that whatever we can add on to this time with Costa would be absolutely vital for everyone in Chicago,” Haines-Stewart said. “Because if people can’t make it up to The Block or if we want to show a greater variety of works in the artist’s filmography, then we could do this better by being a kind of coalitional force working with other theaters in Chicago.” 

In addition to enriching Chicago’s film culture, Fons said collaboration between venues emphasizes the subject’s significance. 

“I think when we all band together, it does underscore who we’re presenting and why we’re presenting it,” she said. 

In Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, originally filmed as an episode of the French television docuseries Cinéma, de notre temps, Costa’s still camera watches and learns from the processes of a pair of greats at work. A testament to the power of observation, Jean-Luc Godard called it “The best film ever made about editing and cinema.” Likewise, Costa’s presence as Hoffman Visiting Artist in Documentary Media will give students their own opportunity to learn from the work of a titan.  

“The mirroring there is going to be a really lovely gesture,” Haines-Stewart said. 

Eric Patrick, Northwestern Associate Professor and Director of the MFA in Documentary Media program, said it’s the breadth of Costa’s body of work that makes him an ideal candidate for the Hoffman Visiting Artist for Documentary Media residency and for students to learn from.  

“Pedro Costa is a giant of film,” he said. “He’s really one of the masters of slow cinema, it’s a kind of filmmaking that exists outside of traditional narrative frameworks, especially within documentary practice.” 

The MFA program was founded on just that idea: of documentary as a diverse practice. Documentary is more than just an expository medium or journalistic reportage, Patrick said. Much of experimental film has a bias toward documentary, one traceable back to artists like Stan Brakhage and other key figures of the American avant-garde.  

“Our whole curriculum is kind of geared towards people that are working in a sort of interdisciplinary or hybridist way,” Patrick said. “We think of documentary in the sense of something that’s non-fiction, but then there are also filmmakers that use some of the language of what I would call documentary practice.” 

As such, Costa was a perfect candidate for students to learn from.  

The two features Block Cinema will screen embody a rethinking of form and approach that might shake up students’ understanding of their own filmmaking practice, Haines-Stewart said. 

“By showing work from the early 2000s at The Block, we are going to be focusing on the creative decisions Costa was making at a point of radically rethinking his practice, moving toward a new way of filmmaking,” she said. “I think that will be inspiring for young filmmakers to see.”

In addition to screening programs, Costa’s residency will also include a masterclass for students, one-on-one critiques, and departmental social events. 

“We think of our grad students as colleagues, and so we think of that sort of mentorship role as a cyclical process for all of us,” Patrick said. “And I feel like that’s going to be great, for him to be able to jump into that.”