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Official Selection PIFF 40

The Ornithologist

Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues

Portugal, France, Brazil • 2016 • 118 mins. • In Portuguese, English, Mandarin, Mirandese, Latin

Showtimes & Past Screenings

Winner of the Best Director award at the Locarno Film Festival, Rodrigues’s The Ornithologist follows a man’s journey on a remote river in Portugal in search of rare birds. When his kayak capsizes, he is saved by two Christian Chinese women on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. They are but the first of a cast of strange characters who will engage him in a transformational spiritual and metaphysical journey through sprawling, often psychedelic forests. Rodrigues’s exotic, pastoral meditation on landscape, ethnography, and personal transcendence is a visually ravishing, profoundly hypnotic experience. In Portuguese, English, Mandarin Chinese, Mirandese, and Latin with English subtitles. Adult audiences.

Reviews: Cinema Scope 1, Cinema Scope 2, Brooklyn Magazine, In Review Online (third review), The New York Times (last review)

Interviews: Interview with João Pedro Rodrigues at Cinema Scope, Interview with João Pedro Rodrigues at Filmmaker Magazine

 

Filmography: The Last Time I Saw Macao (2012), To Die Like a Man (2009), Two Drifters (2005), O Fantasma (2000)

Appears in: 40th Portland International Film Festival, PIFF XL: Global Panorama

The Northwest Film Center recognizes and honors the Indigenous peoples of this region on whose ancestral lands the museum now stands. These include the Willamette Tumwater, Clackamas, Kathlemet, Molalla, Multnomah and Watlala Chinook Peoples and the Tualatin Kalapuya who today are part of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and many other Native communities who made their homes along the Columbia River. We also want to recognize that Portland today is a community of many diverse Native peoples who continue to live and work here. We respectfully acknowledge and honor all Indigenous communities—past, present, future—and are grateful for their ongoing and vibrant presence.