Drawing on their film “Where Is the Street? or “With No Before and After”, which they shot in 16 mm in the middle of the pandemic, the two filmmakers now present an installation establishing a dialogue with the film “Os Verdes Anos” (1963), the debut feature by Paulo Rocha that founded the New Portuguese Cinema movement.

“Sem Antes Nem Depois” is a film installation by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata, organised by the Portuguese Film Archive, in partnership with the BoCA biennial and the National Society of Fine Arts, as part of the “Malamor/Tainted Love” film cycle, that summons the past to interrogate the present. Rather than a remake or a nostalgic tribute, it consists in the friction between two times and two gazes: Lisbon in 1963 and Lisbon between 2019 and 2021; rebellious youth, mutating geographies, accumulating silences. The directors themselves describe these films as dizygotic twins from the same birth — works separated by six decades that, placed side by side, mutually illuminate and confront each other.

The installation presents the audience with this sensitive juxtaposition: side by side, two images of the same city, two rhythms, two modes of listening to time and urban space. What has changed? What remains the same? And, above all, how do we see (or re-see) reality through cinema?

“Sem Antes Nem Depois” is an act of expanded editing, where cinema becomes installation and the onlooker is invited into a fold between eras — not in order to compare, but to be surprised by a world no longer the same, despite still being our own.