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Mubi's retrospective Out of this World: The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes is showing July – September, 2020.Above: The Portuguese WomanIt's staggering how complete the cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes is already in her first film, a feature no less: O Som da Terra a Tremer (1990) is an explosion of feeling and thought and invention carried by the profoundest of knowledge about cinema and the arts. Thus, it is most lamentable that it took another two decades plus for her to be recognized by international film culture at its most general level, with A Woman’s Revenge (2012), a work refined and lean, almost minimalist, très Portuguese à la Oliveira, thus similar to other films, other auteurs from Europe's western-most nation—and therefore welcome with open arms at all the places usually deemed right.While one can easily say that in the end it all worked out, one has to immediately...

A Portuguese Woman“It doesn’t really matter where things come from. What matters is picking things up again, mess them up, try to push them forward in a different way. All of us do it, we’ve all been doing it all through time, and things haven’t really changed that much since Greece. What we can try is to do something that seems to be new, or that is shown in a whole different way—even if not necessarily intentionally.”In a way, that’s what Rita Azevedo Gomes has been doing through her career as a filmmaker. A career, avowedly, somewhat confidential—her latest fiction, The Portuguese Woman, is only her 9th film since her 1990 debut O Som da Terra a Tremer—but one that has been quietly snowballing since 2012’s The Revenge of a Woman, to her own surprise, became a firm festival favorite. Her 2016 poetic...