Edgar Pêra is a Director, Scriptwriter and Editor Portugais born on 19 november 1960 at Lisbon (Portugal)
Edgar Pêra
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Edgar Henrique Clemente Pêra (born 19 November 1960) is a Portuguese filmmaker, and has done more than one hundred films for cinema, tv, theatre dance, cine-concerts, galleries, internet and other media. He has been considered “the most persistently individualistic Portuguese filmmaker”.
Pêra writes occasionally fiction and essays for newspapers and is also a graphic comic artist. Aka Mr. Ego, Man-Kamera (image), Artur Cyanetto (sound).
In 1981 Edgar Pêra was studying Psychology, but switched to Film at the Portuguese National Conservatory, presently Lisbon Theatre and Film School (Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema).
Pêra has auto-financed and produced many his own movies, or directed "auteur films" for cultural institutions.
The first phase of Edgar Pêra’s work started in 1984, shooting Portuguese rock bands in a neuro-realist style. Pêra’s first official film was shot in 1988 in the Ruins of Chiado, a neighborhood in the center of Lisbon that suffered a major fire that year. In 1990 Reproduta Interdita is shown at the Portuguese Horror Film Festival, Fantasporto. In 1991 he directs A Cidade de Cassiano /The City of Cassiano, a film about the Portuguese modernist architect Cassiano Branco.
He directs his first (cine-cosmopolitan and controversial) feature in 1994, Manual de Evasão LX 94/Manual of Evasion (for Lisbon 1994 Capital of Culture), articulating an aesthetic legacy of soviet silent films, with a neuropunk way of creating and capturing instantaneous reality. Pêra invited three major counterculture American writers: Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Rudy Rucker and asked them about the nature of time.
In 1996 he founded with the elementaristic philosopher Manuel Rodrigues, Akademia Luzoh-Galaktica, a trans-media working space.
During that time he produces and directs several films made with his students and takes four years to edit his feature, A Janela (Maryalva Mix)/The Window (Don Juan Mix), premiered at the Locarno Festival in 2001. From then there’s change in Pêra’s work, inflecting towards a more emotional cinema, but keeping the emphasis in trans-realist editing and eccentric humor. In 2006 Edgar Pêra has a retrospective at the Indie Lisboa and wins awards in every category of the festival for Movimentos Perpétuos/Perpetual Movements, a cine-tribute to legendary Portuguese guitar composer and player Carlos Paredes.
In Paris he wins the Pasolini Award for his career, along with Alejandro Jodorowsky, Agnes B. and Fernando Arrabal.
O Barão/The Baron premiered in 2011 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Over the past three years directed several shorts, and independent documentaries about Madredeus and other Portuguese bands, based on his personal archives, and started to experiment in the 3D format. Pêra’s last film, Cinesapiens is a segment of 3x3D, an anthology 3D feature with 2 other films by Jean-Luc Godard and Peter Greenaway, premiered at the closing night of La Semaine de la Critique of the Cannes Film festival.
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