Like the blues, fado, with its strummed guitars and plucked mandolins, can be lively or poignant as it contemplates unrequited love, homesickness and the general malaise of being down on your luck. As with his other musical films like Sevillanas (SFIFF 1993), Iberia (SFIFF 2006), Flamenco and Tango, Carlos Saura brings together a range of the finest practitioners of the art, including Mariza, Camané, Carlos do Carmo and Chico Buarque. Adding artists from Mozambique, Brazil and Cabo Verde, Saura takes us down unforgettable side streets, leavening the traditional with the talents of Lila Downs, Caetano Veloso and others. He has a genius for using the camera to bring new dimensions to sound, motion, color and feeling with his ever-inventive staging of performances, enriched by costuming, backgrounds, projections and disarming closeups. The spirit of the port city of Lisbon, Portugal, the place that gave birth to fado, is invoked with location shooting, vintage footage and other graphic imagery, elements new to the Saura musical film canon. “I hope that this film will serve to launch fados into the world,” says Saura, who celebrates over 50 years of making films with one of his most polished, inspired and satisfying efforts. Whether or not you know fado or any of the artists here, after this stirring musical journey, you are not likely to forget them. (93 min, Zeitgeist Films)

PODCAST
Miguel Pendás discusses the great Spanish director Carlos Saura's latest musical performance exploration, a passionate and visually lush journey into the heart of the moody Portuguese song style enjoying an international vogue.
VIEW  |  DOWNLOAD mp4 (16 MB)

Showtimes: 1:50 pm, 7:20 pm

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Photographed by José Luis López-Linares, Eduardo Serra. With Mariza, Caetano Veloso, Camané, Lila Downs.