Torpor Revisited - Coming Soon

Duchess, Duchess - 5th Anniversary Online Release

Captüra Filmes is proud to host the feature-length drama Duchess, Duchess and celebrate its 5th Anniversary.
Produced in 2004 by I.M.Perfection Pictures, previewed at the Cannes Film Festival that same year and later bought and broadcast by Sky TV, this was the fourth film by Writer/Director João Paulo Simões.

The mind that would later bring us Absences of Mind, Antlers of Reason and Stolen Waters & Other Absences can be seen here at work with the same daring, yet lucid approach.

Preceded by two minutes of dark screen, with only but a few echoeing sounds before the 'curtain' is raised, the film is a deliberately stark affair. The fictionalised theatrical roots inform each scene and sexual jealousy soon gives way to all-encompassing guilt.

It's not just the male psyche that is deconstructed and laid bare here, but the ultimate incompatibility between verbal exposure of past desires and an intimate present relationship.

For the delight its worldwide fans, Duchess, Duchess is now available in its entirety online and can be viewed here: http://www.vimeo.com/4855460

Antlers Casting News

Actors Alice Carder and Alexandre Guedes de Sousa have joined the cast of The Thalus Trilogy. They will feature in both Antlers of Reason II: Morning Interim and Antlers of Reason III: Nether Edge Temptress. Alice Carder plays Lady Gwen Greene, whilst Guedes de Sousa, a regular in João Paulo Simões's films, returns to the role of Lucas - from the original Portuguese-language Captüra Filmes productions Torpor (2003) and the soon to be released Torpor Revisited (2009).

Visit http://antlersofreason.blogspot.com/ for more information.

Before Captüra...

As the feature-length film Duchess, Duchess (2004) is set to be made permanently available online, Captüra Filmes looks back on the early work of Writer/Director João Paulo Simões.

His first short film, Imogen Meets The Merchant (2001), announced the arrival of the promise of a new approach to filmmaking and established the mythological/supernatural angle which was to become more prominent in later projects. It delivered an ambitiously fragmented narrative, which successfully wove together Past and Present under an all-encompassing sense of yearning.
In Overture (2002), Simões explored much darker aspects of the human condition. An acknowledgement of Cinema's inherently voyeuristic nature was combined with a cyclical structure, which was in turn drawn from J.S.Bach's counterpoint works. The composer's work was to become one of the most important and crucial references in the ensuing Captüra Filmes productions.

Ignored and neglected by its producers at the time, Duchess, Duchess is probably João Paulo Simões's most conventional film. Deliberately theatrical and old-fashioned in tone, the film was to have its broadcast rights bought by Sky TV and achieve a cult status - its central subject of retrospective jealousy perhaps ringing true to the most attentive spectators.

Unprecedently (and in response to a degree of pyracy it endured), the film will be soon made available online in its entirety.

The Official Trailer can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7kgiqN-Ifk

In Memory of JG Ballard

"I feel that not much can be said or added regarding JG Ballard's death yesterday. In many ways, he wrote his own epitaph - in the shape of his last book, the autobiography Miracles of Life, but also throughout his career in fiction.
It's with such groundbreaking, visionary works as The Atrocity Exhibition, High-Rise and Crash that a personal vision dares to express the unacknowledged. With unflinching commitment, Ballard presents us with disturbingly plausible psychopathologies, which in turn highlight the true self-destructive nature of our relationship with the modern world...

His work continued to be relevant, fine-tuning a double-sided formula of alienation and familiar references. The British psyche informed every aspect of his writings and was repeatedly dissected. But the poignancy of his work surpasses the colours and shapes of any flag.
It tells of the human condition at odds with a set of castrating codes that we, ourselves, create and disguise as Progress.

JG Ballard came full circle in his own body of work and now rests in peace. His books will go on living. I will continue to be inspired by them for the rest of my own life. With the certainty that more and more possibilities can be found in that exhilirating pause one experiences between chapters of his novels..." - João Paulo Simões

Antlers of Reason Now Available on DVD

We are proud to finally release the Special Edition DVD of the original Antlers of Reason - the first feature-length instalment in the Thalus Trilogy.

The film has been digitally remastered and the DVD includes such extras as a Sieben Music Video, two Torpor Revisited Previews and the Official Thalus Trilogy Trailer.

You can order it directly from this site or from other selected online venues at the discounted price of £7.99.

We are proud to present the double release of the music videos Lucifer On The Moor and Virgin In The Green. Extracted from the new Sieben album As They Should Sound, these two companion pieces incorporate previous material from the High Broad Field DVD and the feature film Antlers of Reason respectively.



Read more about their inventive visual approach on
http://frontiermedia.blogspot.com/
And about the upcoming Special Edition DVD release of Antlers of Reason on http://antlersofreason.blogspot.com/

As They Should Sound available on http://www.matthowden.com/