Director of photography Eduardo Serra will have a cycle in July at the Cinemateca

According to the Cinemateca, the cycle "Interpreting a text with light" features a selection of 16 films from Eduardo Serra's cinematography, revealing a little of his work as a director of photography in Portugal, France and the United States.

The program begins on July 8th with a session showing the three documentaries that Eduardo Serra made between the 1970s and 1990s: "Um aniversário", "Rink-Hockey" and "Cinéma portugais? Un mod d'emploi".

"A Birthday" (1975) was filmed in April 1975 and marks one year since the April 1974 revolution, at a time when Eduardo Serra had already been living in Paris for a decade. The film "follows the first free elections for the Constituent Assembly, based on the experiences of agricultural workers from three villages in the district of Beja", says the Cinemateca.

"Rink-Hockey" (1982) is a portrait of the 1982 World Roller Hockey Championship in Barcelos, in which Portugal was crowned champion, and "Cinéma portugais? Un mod d'emploi" (1990), a "critical-historical essay on the tribulations of Portuguese cinema", commissioned by the television channel SEPT.

Eduardo Serra is the only Portuguese to have been nominated twice for an Oscar, for his cinematography on "Wings of Love" (1997), by Ian Softley, and "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (2003), by Peter Webber, a film that will be shown at the Cinemateca.

Born in Lisbon in 1943, Eduardo Serra headed to Paris to study cinema, having left behind an engineering course at the Instituto Superior Técnico, an intense film club activity and a disagreement with the policies of the Estado Novo dictatorship.

In Paris, he trained in cinema at the ENS Louis Lumière and studied History of Art and Archaeology at the Sorbonne. He began as a camera assistant, working on more than thirty films over the course of a decade, until in the early 1980s he tried his hand at cinematography, making his debut with "Sem sombra de pecado" (1982), by José Fonseca e Costa, which will be shown at the Cinemateca.

Eduardo Serra, who turns 82 in October, would go on to work with more Portuguese directors, such as Fernando Lopes and José Mário Grilo, but it was between Paris and London that he built his career and made the leap to Hollywood.

In French cinema, he made seven films with Claude Chabrol and nine with Patrice Leconte, the last of which was in 2013, in "A Promise".

Eduardo Serra has also been the cinematographer for films such as "Blood Diamond" by Edward Zwick, "Jude" by Michael Winterbottom, "The Protected" by M. Night Shyamalan, and "Beyond the Sea" by Kevin Spacey. He also worked with David Yates on the two films in the "Harry Potter" series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows".

Eduardo Serra, whose method involved respecting the notion of natural light, was distinguished with career awards in 2014 by the Society of Cinematographers of the United States and the Portuguese Academy of Cinema.

In 2004, he was awarded the rank of Commander of the Order of Infante D. Henrique by the then President of the Republic Jorge Sampaio, and in 2017 he was awarded the rank of Grand Officer of the same order by the Head of State Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.

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