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

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