RETROSPECTIVE

KAREN AKERMAN

MIGUEL SEABRA LOPES

Here at Wigu, we are absolutely delighted to introduce you to the work of Karen Akerman and Miguel Seabra Lopes.

Born and based in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon—places as distant and different from České Budějovice as one can imagine—their films still speak a language that feels unexpectedly close.

Sometimes, cinema requires you to share the filmmaker's cultural background, history, or moment in time to truly connect. That is not the case here. The language of their work is strikingly universal, and we believe it can crawl under your skin no matter who or where you are.

Whether it's a short film about a book that was immediately censored by the Portuguese fascist regime—or a film seen through toddler eyes, the work of Akerman and Lopes invites deep, intuitive attention. And by attention we MEAN ATTENTION.

There's a hallucinatory line running through their films: essays become narrative fiction, the visible is haunted by the invisible, and reality plays with images that are either deeply associative or disarmingly banal. The result is a cinema that feels both casual and meticulously crafted—charming in a way that perhaps both Godard and Lumière would have appreciated.

Stories without stories. Stories of not-stories. Or simply: life.

Call it what you will.