Where Is This Street or With No Before and After

Lisbon revisited through cinema memory, urban change and pandemic silence

Where Is This Street? Or With No Before and After begins from a simple but deeply personal vantage point. From the window of their Lisbon apartment, filmmakers João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata look out onto a location used by Paulo Rocha in his landmark 1963 film The Green Years. This coincidence becomes the starting point for a cinematic return to the places that shaped one of the founding works of Portuguese Novo Cinema, guided by Rocha’s gaze and legacy.

Retracing the original film’s locations almost frame by frame, the documentary unfolds as a study of Lisbon’s geological, urban and social layers. Shot on 16 mm to remain faithful to Rocha’s material conditions, the film captures a city marked by decades of transformation. Gentrification, globalisation and the erosion of everyday life coexist with traces of intimacy, memory and cinephilia. The project’s production was interrupted by the Covid pandemic, and the filmmakers ultimately incorporated this rupture into the film itself. Empty streets, social distancing, masks and the persistent soundscape of emergency vehicles give rise to a Lisbon that appears suspended in time.

As fiction is stripped away from the original locations, the city becomes a living document of metamorphosis, a recurring theme throughout Rodrigues’s work. Occasional appearances by Isabel Ruth, star of The Green Years, bridge past and present, while music and gesture reintroduce moments of enchantment into the altered urban landscape. Where Is This Street? Or With No Before and After reflects on cinema as cartography, on cities as bodies in constant flux, and on how ghosts of the past continue to inhabit contemporary reality.