Lineup Marche du Film 2023

The Nothingness Club

Não Sou Nada
directed by EDGAR PÊRA
drama
2023
Portugal
92 min
Portuguese, English
Tags
Festivals
Synopsis

Surrealistic biopic - a mix of life events and plots and themes of the works of the greatest Portuguese modernist of the 20th century, Fernando Pessoa.
The Nothingness Club is set inside Fernando Pessoa’s head. The writer created over one hundred heteronyms who, despite being fictional characters, had very distinct and personal poetic styles.
Within this interior world, the Portuguese, Brazilian, Indian, English and American heteronyms are characters in flesh and blood who work for him at The Nothingness Club, on his writings.
In this utopian universe, Pessoa is a Super-Pessoa, a director who distributes ideas to be developed by his employees. The Nothingness Club is a prosperous business venture with several subsidiaries, such as a publishing house for books and magazines, a film production company, an astrology cabinet, a private detective agency, while providing psychiatric advice as well as giving shelter to young “charadists”.

 

Crew
Producer Rodrigo Areias
Screenplay Edgar Pêra, Luísa Costa Gomes
Cinematography Jorge Quintela
Editor Cláudio Vasques
Sound Design Pedro Marinho, Pedro Góis
production by Bando À Parte
Cast
Miguel Borges — Fernando Pessoa
Victoria Guerra — Ophelya
Press
A surreal psychological thriller to get lost in, Não Sou Nada (“I Am Nothing”) draws viewers into the demonically kaleidoscopic world of Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa. It is the most ambitious film to date from Edgar Pêra, whose broad and striking filmography was celebrated in a career-spanning retrospective at IFFR 2019.
Callum McLean
Não Sou Nada – The Nothingness Club: a lurid vision of Fernando Pessoa’s inner lives. This atmospheric imagining of the many personalities that populated the mindscape of the renowned Portuguese poet is a woozy, unruly enigma.
Ben Nicholson
Life is filled with paradoxes: nothingness can walk hand in hand with wholeness. This is one of the feelings that one may experience while reading the title of The Nothingness Club - Não sou nada [+], Edgar Pêra’s latest feature, taking part in the Big Screen Competition at IFFR. It’s a title that leads us straight to Álvaro de Campos, one of Fernando Pessoa’s many heteronyms, and his poem A Tabacaria. But this is just the first of many steps in a film that looks into Pessoa’s writings, draws inspiration from them and then moves on, into another dimension – a place to capture what Pessoa’s writings had and still have to offer, allowing us to dream with (or through) him.
Teresa Vieira
Edgar Pera fans will recognise the Portuguese auteur’s baleful character sketches (O Barao from the IFFR 2019 retrospective) in this stylish psychological thriller that dives into the deranged world of one of the 20th century’s most significant figures, the Portuguese poet and writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), here played by Miguel Borges. The Nothingness Club is possibly Pera’s most substantial and relatable film to date, a noirish mannered thriller that plunders the emotional vulnerabilities and vicissitudes of the creative psyche in exploring the many faces of Pessoa’s heteronyms, the three main being Ricardo Reis (Correia), Alvaro Campos (Jeronimo) and Alberto Caeiro (Nunes).
Meredith Taylor
"Não Sou Nada - The Nothingness Club" é apresentado como um "cinenigma" em torno de Fernando Pessoa e da obra literária multiplicada por dezenas de heterónimos, que tem estreia marcada em competição no Festival de Cinema de Roterdão.
e-cultura.pt
An outlandish, radical trip inside Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa's mind, gorgeously realised as a mysterious office of alter-egos and clacking typewriters.
VERDICT, Carmen Gray