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O Sangue, Pedro Costa’s directorial debut, looks back with fascination at some beloved masters: John Ford, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Jacques Tourneur. Costa’s explicit duty to these informal pioneers of the landscape, of duration, of the spectres of history, makes this film-suvenir a curious object even within his radical filmography: a chain of frames bordering on mannerism, obsessive images that refer to those sources of inspiration translated into his own film with a gesture of intense fascination. The story of Nino and Vincente, forced to slalom through a myriad of problems following the death of their father and discovering in their friend Clara an enigmatic mother figure, does not alter the film’s manifest essence. O Sangue remains, above all, a declaration of love for cinema itself, as an art of charming contrasts; an elegy for the black-and-white of yesteryear, which supplanted colour with the sculptural grace of film, for absolute feeling, for an almost punkish freedom. After O Sangue, Pedro Costa packed into a single bottle all the cinematic memories from which he had assembled his film; he then threw it into the open sea, like a love and a farewell letter, wishing as if to forget, so that he could learn again later, everything he had known until then. (Alma Buhagiar)