LE RIRE ET LE COUTEAU
By Pedro Pinho
Portugal / France / Romania / Brazil
FESTIVALS & AWARDS
Best actress awarded to Cleo Diára, Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2025
SYNOPSIS
Sergio travels to a metropolis in West Africa to work for an NGO as an environmental engineer on a road project between the desert and the forest. There, he becomes entangled in an intimate yet unbalanced relationship with two inhabitants of the city, Diara and Gui. As neo-colonial dynamics among the expatriate community unravel, this fragile bond becomes his only refuge from an impending collapse into solitude or barbarism.
DIRECTOR’S BIO
Pedro Pinho was born in Lisbon and has lived in Paris, Barcelona, Maputo, and Mindelo. In 2009, he founded, with other five filmakers, the production company Terratreme. His first documentary, Bab Sebta (co-directed with Frederico Lobo), premiered at FIDMarseille in 2008, where it won the Marseille Esperance Award. The medium-length fiction film Um Fim do Mundo premiered in the Berlinale Generation section in 2013, and in 2014, the documentary As Cidades e as Trocas (co-directed with Luísa Homem) premiered at both FIDMarseille and Art of the Real at Lincoln Center in New York. In 2017, his first feature film, The Nothing Factory, premiered at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize from the International Critics and went on to receive 20 other awards at festivals around the world. The film was commercially released in Portugal, France, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Italy, China, Belgium, the former Yugoslavia, and Argentina. In 2025, O Riso e a Faca, his second feature film, premieres at Un Certain Regard section of the Oficial Selection of the Cannes Film Festival.
CAST
Sérgio Coragem
Cleo Diára
Jonathan Guilherme
CREW
Director/ Writer : Pedro Pinho
Production : Terratreme Films, Uma Pedra no Sapato (Portugal)
Coproduction : Still Moving (France), DeFilm (Romania), Bubbles (Brazil)
DOP : Ivo Lopes Araújo
Set and costume designers : Camille Lemonnier, Livia Lattanzio, Ana Meleiro
Editors : Rita M. Pestana, Karen Akerman, Cláudia Oliveira, Pedro Pinho
Sound Editor : Pablo Lamar
Make-up artist and hairstylist : Ami Camará