José & Pilar
DOC. 125'
2011
Leg. ES, EN
Show of the couple day-to-day in Lanzarote and Lisbon, at home and on business trips around the world, José and Pilar is an amazing portrait of an author during his creative process and the relationship of a couple engaged to change the world - or at least to make it better.
José and Pilar reveals an unknown, Saramago, undoes made ideas and proves that genius and simplicity are compatible. José and Pilar is a glimpse into the life of one of the great designers of the twentieth century and the demonstration that, as Saramago says, "everything can be told another way."
AWARDS
BEST DOCUMENTARY AWARD WINNER Cineport Festival 2011
AUDIENCE AWARD WINNER
34th International Exhibit of São Paulo
AUDIENCE AWARD WINNER
2nd Cinema Exhibit Visões do Sul
OPENING FILM
DOCLISBOA 2010
AUTHORS PRIZE SPA 2011
NOMINATED FOR
Best Movie
BRAZILIAN ACADEMY FILM
NOMINATED FOR
Best Documentary
Best Editing
Best Original Soundtrack
REVIEW
“its so carefully constructed that at times it feels like fiction, shuttling easily and with a surprising level of intimacy between Saramago the public persona and Saramago the private man.”
“VARIETY” - EUA
“So much attention has been paid to “Pina,”Wim Wenders’s 3D homage to the choreographer Pina Bausch, that it’s easy to overlook another documentary that is also competing for the Academy Award for foreign-language film. “José and Pilar,” directed by Miguel Gonçalves Mendes, is Portugal’s submission, and it too comes with an impressive pedigree. Co-produced by the directors Pedro Almodóvar and Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”), it examines the relationship of love and support that sustains José Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, and his wife, Pilar del Rio, as Saramago battled to write one last novel before his death in 2010 at the age of 87.”
Larry Rohter, “NEW YORK TIMES”
“It is very difficult to make a movie like José and Pilar, gentle, respectful and profound. A great movie, about a great man and a great woman, over time and death, about love and about life.”
José Padilha
“Gonçalves work is configured as an exciting document, exceptional, which in a surely ruthless way, this critic dazzled.”
“EL PAÍS” - Spain
“(…) a film as powerful as difficult to catalog. (…) It left us alone with Saramago and Pilar, even when the whole world was around.”
Alexandre Borges in JORNAL “I”
“Delicate and beautiful, but at the same time cruel.”
in “O GLOBO” NEWSPAPER
“The Camera of Miguel Gonçalves Mendes is discreet but does not hide or omit anything essential, not to know, but to be together with Pilar and Jose.”
Luis Sepúlveda
“Miguel Gonçalves Mendes took four years to make this documentary, but to see it makes us realize that will be remembered by many more.”
Cristina Margato in “EXPRESSO” NEWSPAPER
“A rare truth in cinema, José and Pilar is a touching love story..”
Fernando Meirelles in “PÚBLICO”
“There is melancholy, then come the Portuguese and finally Miguel. My greatest effort in this film was to convince him that he had created a small and rare jewel.”
Fernando Meirelles
"The film is the most intimate portrait ever made of the Portuguese writer"
André Miranda in "”O GLOBO” NEWSPAPER"
"...But José and Pilar, by Miguel Gonçalves Mendes, is still causing great expectation. A meticulous work of Mendes that, for three years, filmed the routine Nobel Prize. Mendes composed a true profile, edited as if moved by the peculiar mood of Saramago.”
The State of São Paulo