Edgar Pêra

Edgar Pêra
Edgar Pêra, 4 April 2011, photo by Rudy Rucker
Born	(1960-11-19) 19 November 1960 (age 56) Lisbon, Portugal
Nationality	Portuguese
Occupation	Film director

Edgar Henrique Clemente Pêra (born 19 November 1960) is a Portuguese filmmaker. He writes occasionally fiction and essays and is also a graphic comics artist. Edgar Pêra studied Psychology, but switched to Film at the Portuguese National Conservatory, presently Lisbon Theatre and Film School (Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema). Aka Mr. Ego, Man-Kamera (image), Artur Cyanetto (sound). Edgar Pêra has auto-financed and produced many his own movies, or directed "auteur films" for cultural institutions. " If there has been in Portugal a filmmaker who has continuously filmed (apart from the well-known case, in the opposite direction, of Manoel de Oliveira), he is Edgar Pêra, as a consequence of his availability and insistence on doing so regardless of the perennial problems of juries and public subsidies. But it is also a consequence of his adaptation to light technologies, he and his camera, constituting symbiotically an "Ego" that is really making its own film-diaries". (Augusto M. Seabra) Pêra started as a screenwriter but in 1985 bought a camera, inspired by Dziga Vertov, and never stopped shooting on a dially basis. "Pêra has a penchant for odd, eccentric, obscure and sometimes twisted humor. His unique touches include an arthouse, avant-garde approach somehow combining retro and avant-garde modernities.” (The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre)

Considered “the most persistently individualistic Portuguese filmmaker”. Edgar Pêra has done more than one hundred films for cinema, TV, theatre dance, cine-concerts, galleries, internet and other media. The first phase of Edgar Pêra’s work started in 1984, shooting Portuguese rock bands in a neuro-punk style. Pêra’s first film was shot in 1988 in the Ruins of Chiado, a neighborhood in the center of Lisbon that suffered a major fire that year. In 1990 Reproduta Interdita was shown at the Portuguese Horror Film Festival, Fantasporto. In 1991 he directs A Cidade de Cassiano /The City of Cassiano, a film about the Portuguese modernist architect Cassiano Branco (Grand Prix Festival Films D'Architecture Bordeaux). After this consensual film, Pêra goes into another direction, making more radical movies.

After O trabalho Liberta/Arbeitch Macht Frei? an SWK4 - The Parallel Universes of Almada Negreiros, he directs his first "cine-cosmopolitan" (and very controversial) feature in 1994, Manual de Evasão LX 94/Manual of Evasion (for Lisbon 1994 Capital of Culture), articulating an aesthetic legacy of soviet construtivist silent films, with what the filmmaker called "a neuro-punk way of creating and capturing instantaneous reality". Many years after its release The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre wrote that Manual of Evasion is a "Portuguese thought-provoking experimental movie with a great potential for cult status." Pêra invited three major counterculture American writers: Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Rudy Rucker and asked them about the nature of time. Manual of Evasion LX94 was received in Portugal with very strong criticism, both for and against the movie.