“I Only Rest in the Storm”, an interview with director Pedro Pinho

May 19, 2025

Interview with Pedro Pinho director of "I Only Rest in the Storm"

"I Only Rest in the Storm", an interview with director Pedro Pinho Bénédicte Prot

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With “I Only Rest in the Storm“, Portuguese director Pedro Pinho is back on the Croisette – eight years after presenting his first fiction feature, the nearly 3-hour-long social musical/spoken film “The Nothing Factory“, at the Directors Fortnight –, this time in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. His new formidable effort (at three hours and a half which frankly go by without one’s noticing or minding), incredibly nuanced and humanistic, set in Guinea-Bissau around the story of a Portuguese expert meant to evaluate the ecological and social impact of the construction of a road through traditional rice plantations, opens a vertiginous array of paths of reflection upon his presence and the presence of other expats (from former Portuguses colonies, humanitary organisations) and foreign workers, the variety within the local population, certain power dynamics…

On the continuity between this film set in Africa and Pedro Pinho’s first feature, set in a factory

“The proposal of this film was to take further the possibility of working with the word, the spoken word and political views as cinematic material. How can we transform something that is not cinematic at all into something that has cinematic value.“

About the fact that dualisms are a persistent way of understanding the world, but are actually never quite so clear

“The subject of identity and fluidity is a very strong presence in the film. This idea of creating a polyphony of perspectives also favours a blurring of the borders of the self – who am I? Who am i in relation to others? How do the others see me?“

On polyphony, voices and languages

“When I first went to this part of the world, I was struck by the fact that people, children, can speak up to four or five languages – the language of the street, of the mother, of the father, of the coloniser, the official language –, so immediately, they are used to dealing with that proliferation of cultures and ways of thinking, whilst Europe is more monolithic and imposed that upon the world. (…) There are many languages in the film and there’s also a game of who understands who.”

On continuing to learn throughout the shoot

“The writing process was ongoing until the end of the shoot, and of course even during the editing, but it was really informed by the actors and the people that we met along the way during the shoot.”

Written by: Bénédicte Prot

The Nothing Factory

Guest

Pedro Pinho

Film

I Only Rest in the Storm

Festival

Festival de Cannes

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