Joaquim Pinto has been an important figure in Portuguese cinema for over 30 years, working as a director, producer, and sound recordist for a host of renowned filmmakers such as Raul Ruiz and Joao Cesar Monteiro. Pinto has been living with HIV for over a decade, and with What Now? Remind Me, Pinto has created an intimate and deeply personal meditation of his struggle with this disease. Looking back over his life, Pinto's film is full of reflection, with the filmmaker giving a unique look into the mind of someone who has been dancing with death for years. Essentially a reflective video essay, What Now? Remind Me gives the viewer some semblance of what he is going through, visually expressing his condition and the fractured memories that rise to the surface in such a difficult situation. The opening shot of the film, a snail slowly crawling across the frame, perfectly symbolizes Joaquim Pinto's current journey, the slow voyage towards death. Taking experimental drugs, Pinto's film captures a man seeing his life slowly slipping away, the drugs weaking him physically and mentally, making it hard for him to even maintain his relationships, with his mind failing to keep up with his body. The treatment beomes merely an allusion of living, being so highly medicated towards the end of Pinto's film that What Now? Remind Me makes you almost wish dealth on this man, giving him a release from his plight. What Now? Remind Me is both deeply intimate and profoundly epic in scale, with Pinto capturing how insignificant nearly everything is when put up against the time itself. At nearly three hours in length, Joaquim Pinto's What Now? Remind Me can be somewhat an endurance test but its meditative nature delivers countless moments of life-affirming poignancy.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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