Aos pedaços

Ruy Guerra is the kind of auteur that contemporary movie culture seems to have ever more problems with: one cannot pinpoint him in a national, cultural nor in an aesthetic fashion. Trained in France, Guerra is an internationally successful filmmaker who worked mainly in Brazil but also in Portugal, Mexico, France and his native Mozambique, whose post-independence film production he helped build up. Always experimenting with styles, every new work is a surprise (his penchant for all things Brecht perhaps being the only constant factor to his art). In Pieces is no exception to this non-rule, for he never did anything quite like this hallucinatory, ultra-stylized black-and-white piece of Kafka noir about one man and his two lovers – in the same apartment and yet oceans apart. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)