Ricardo Costa (born 25 January 1940 in Peniche) is a Portuguese film director and producer.
Most of his filmography consists of documentary films, many of them being contaminated by fiction (docufiction and ethnofiction). He uses the techniques of direct cinema, non only as a tool for practising salvage ethnography but also as an instrument which helps him to compose a sober, "musical" and poetic narrative, suitable for common audiences.
His latest feature film, Mists, was selected for the 60th Venice Film Fetival (2003).
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Costa completed his studies in 1967 at the Faculty of Arts at the Lisbon University. After submitting a thesis on the novels of Kafka (Franz Kafka: writing in the mirror), he obtained a PHD in 1969. He was a high school teacher and owned a company (MONDAR editors), where he published a number of sociological texts and avant-garde papers, literature and cinema. After the Carnation Revolution in 1974, he became a filmmaker. He was a partner of Grupo Zero, with other filmmakers like João César Monteiro, Jorge Silva Melo and Alberto Seixas Santos. Later, he became an independent producer with the company Diafilme, where he produced several of his films and some of other directors. He is the author of essays on cinema, vision and language. He organizes film projections and cycles in Paris (Cinémathèque Française and Musée de l’Homme). Shot on the threshold of documentary and fiction, Brumas (Mists) is his latest feature film (Venice Film Festival - New Territories, 2003).
In some way moved by the idea that explains one sentence of Marcel Mauss, a well-known French sociologist and anthropologist, (There is more poetry in a grain of reality than in the brain of a poet), certain Portuguese film-makers, specially after the Carnation Revolution, traveled around their country, from one end to another, camera in hand. With state funds or in co-production with the national broadcast TV station, the RTP, some made "engaged films" (cinéma engagé, i.e. political cinema), but never with lack of charm, others make films in which reality, as an expression of actual events, appears with that poetical charge, as Mauss refers. Films shot with low budgets, but in full liberty. Films portraying reality, a genre to which all those productions fit, would last for a few years and would generate important or even remarkable works, some of which were forgotten.
Costa, who identifies himself more with that simple idea than with the purpose of changing the world, cultivates a style in which reality turns into poetical expression, into human portrait, into an interrogation point about a time which escapes to time, without restriction to the place in which such reality, once captured, takes place. The mise en scène, the fictional attraction, will be for him a permanent temptation.
