PROGRAM NOTES

Narrow Margin will present at Institute of Contemporary Arts as a part of the Nothing But Life: The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes series.

Full program available here: https://www.ica.art/films/azevedo-gomes

“It's life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky

For more than two decades, Rita Azevedo Gomes (b. 1952) has quietly forged and reshaped an unmistakable cinema, rooted in literature, theatre, music and art history, and unfolding with a rare attentiveness to language, performance, and the spaces that open between them, and moving always with deliberate strangeness and clarity.

Originally trained in painting at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes in Lisbon, her cinephilia has found home as an assistant director to figures like Manoel de Oliveira on Francisca, Werner Schroeter (whose filmography we have paired with hers in a forthcoming Long Takes), Valeria Sarmiento and the painter-filmmaker Luís Noronha da Costa, as well as work teaching, and at the Cinemateca Portuguesa. These shifting environments have honed a luminous and explorative approach to cinema across artforms — drawing as much from, and adapting, the literature of Agustina Bessa-Luís, André Gide and Robert Musil, among others.

Gomes’ career has to date formed a bold arc, spanning her innovative feature The Sound of the Shaking Earth (1990) about a self-doubting novelist, the quietly spectral Altar (2003), through to the unforgettable melancholy evocation of doomed young love Fragile as the World (2001), and the sumptuous feminist fable The Portuguese Woman (2018).

This latest Long Takes stands as an invitation to rediscover a cinema that continues to illuminate the rich territories between image, text, history and dream. Beginning in May, this retrospective will include the first full presentation of her work in the UK, including rarely-screened shorts, 35mm presentations, guest introductions, and as a centrepiece of the programme, an extended in-person conversation about her artistic process and the evolving trajectory of her work. The season culminates in the Off-Circuit UK-premiere presentation of her newest, collaboratively made feature film Fuck the Polis (2025).