In this book, the author tries to live up to the filmmaker who, in his films, tries to live up to the characters he films and what happens to them, first in fiction films, then in films that move on the border between documentary and fiction. Characters who, in turn, want to live up to what happens to them. So this is a book that deals with Pedro Costa's work in a systematic and complete way, contextualising it in the history of cinema and in contemporary cinema.

It is therefore an up-to-date account of one of the most important filmmakers in the world today, viewed from a multiplicity of perspectives - filmic, ethical, political, anthropological and artistic - trying to understand how his films tell us what they tell us and what he has added new and original to cinema. And here he is seen as deserving what happens to us because of the attitude taken towards him. That is the ethos of the filmmaker's films and of this book.

Carlos Melo Ferreira was born in Lisbon. He has a degree in Law from the University of Lisbon and a PhD in Communication Sciences, specialising in Cinema, from the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at Universidade Nova.