From August 14-20, Change of Life will be available to stream via Acropolis Cinema and Grasshopper Film. Acropolis will receive 50% of all revenue.
Paulo Rocha’s haunting second feature, Change of Life, tells the beautiful and deeply felt story of a young man, a veteran from the war in Angola, who returns home to his remote fishing village to discover that his former sweetheart is now married to his brother. Inspired by his work with Maneol de Oliveira, Rocha “cast” the local villagers as themselves, interspersed with experienced actors led by the great Isabel Ruth who would go onto become an Oliveira regular and an iconic presence in Pedro Costa’s Ossos (Bones). The poetry of the local vernacular is captured in the textured dialogue written by fellow Portuguese filmmaker Antonio Reis who met Rocha through Oliveira. The film was a critical and commercial success upon release, though it would effectively be the last film that Rocha would make for nearly two decades.
Remarkable... goes a long way towards capturing Portuguese daily life in a time when censorship was rife.
- Colette de Castro, Frameland
Crucial for Portuguese film history [and a] unique film in Rocha’s career... captures the difficult conditions in which the fishermen community of Furadouro lived.
- Daniel Ribas, Porto/Post/Doc
[Rocha's] gestures, colors, ideas (like someone floating above the earth, or a way of introducing a song) can be seen in the works of João Pedro Rodrigues, Rita Azevedo Gomes, and Pedro Costa.
- Lucía Salas, Kinoscope
This illusionless movie with a strong sense of nature has become a classic of Portuguese cinema. The impact of Change of Life can now, for example, be witnessed in the works of a newer master, Pedro Costa.
- Lauri Timonen, Midnight Sun Film Festival
[An] influential masterpiece of poetic neo-realism...crystallizes a major theme anchoring [the] encounter staged between Portuguese cinema and the cinema of the world: the all too often unrealized potential of cinema to critique and, moreover, to reinvent the image and imagination of a nation.
- Haden Guest, MUBI Notebook
(Available to download after screening date)