Around Rocha's Table (A Távola de Rocha)

Paulo Rocha has an unique perspective on life as well as on its transposition to film. Around Rocha's Table delves into the life and work of Paulo Rocha, a cutting-edge filmmaker and founder of a new film movement that would later be dubbed "the nouveau Portugese cinema". This documentary film sets forth a spatial temporal reunion of all the groundwork which underlies Paulo Rocha's cinema. It also unabashedly relies on individual and personal research and reflects an intensive relationship between its author and Rocha, which spanned more then ten years. It is with declared authorial intention that this film creates poetics and metaphors from Rocha's filmed thematic universes, in an attempt to establish dialogues with and between them. There is a plethora of reminiscenes of places of affection, friends and family members who give their testimony regarding their personal and professional relationship with Rocha, which frequently and seamlessly converge into one.

“Samuel Barbosa makes his feature debut with this enlightening of Portuguese Cine Nova director Paulo Rocha (1935-2012) who blazed a trail with his brand of neo-realism in the Sixties and was later known for his rigorously classical films, although sadly neither found much of an audience outside his native Portugal.” - Filmuforia