In Pieces

Ruy Guerra is the kind of auteur that contemporary film culture seems to have ever more problems with: one cannot pinpoint him in a national, cultural, nor in an aesthetic fashion. Trained in France, Guerra is an internationally successful filmmaker who worked mainly in Brazil (essential Cinema Novo classics Os Fuzis, 1964 and Os deuses e os mortos, 1970) but also in Portugal, Mexico (art house favourite Eréndira, 1983), France and his native Mozambique, whose post-independence film production he helped build up.

Always experimenting with styles, every new work is a surprise (his penchant for all things Brecht perhaps being the only constant factor to his art). In Pieces is no exception to this non-rule, for he never did anything quite like this hallucinatory, ultra-stylised black-and-white piece of Kafka noir about one man and his two lovers – in the same apartment and yet oceans apart.