“Incubated on the lateral and figurative margins of Europe, Portuguese cinema can often seem a world unto itself, a semiautonomous territory that evolved at its own pace and at a productive remove from the rest of the continent. The lost years of the Salazar dictatorship and the pent-up energies from decades of repression and dormancy; the deep-seated agrarian tradition and the delayed arrival of industrialization; the vast storehouse of local history and myth and the vibrant cinematheque scene of the post-Salazar years—all have conspired to create in Portugal one of the richest and most distinctive film cultures in the world. Manoel de Oliveira, a one-man century of cinema, looms large for obvious reasons, but a case could be made that for today’s preeminent Portuguese filmmakers, no single figure has been more influential than António Reis.”

“It took António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro six years to construct and collect the images of Ana in their minds, and to finally make them into a film. Both Tras-os-Montes and Ana are the work of a lifetime, in the sense that all its experience is the summarization and culmination of a solitary creative experience, unlike anything else, entirely linked to a region, a land – an insular creation. If a couple of artists such as Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis are so important to us today, it’s because at a time when the industry seems to unanimously choose for a blunt return to serially produced films, they admirably maintain the exigency of an artistic creation, of the production of a singular language, an exigency unmistakably inherited from the great tradition of painting and the Renaissance arts, one that can hardly be found anymore in the film industry, except for the Straubs or Bresson. They are undoubtebly the last ones to sustain this history, to testify to it in a lively way. This interview has been conducted in Berlin, after the screening of Ana at Forum. More than an interview, it became a conversation in which Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis responded to each other, echoing one and the other.”