INTRODUCTION

João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata's “Asian Trilogy” comprises the films they co-directed in and about Macao, the former Portuguese enclave in southeast China. The films are relative oddities in the directors’ filmography, especially when contrasted with the flamboyant melodramas that preceded them (Odete [Two Drifters, 2005] and Morrer Como um Homem [To Die Like a Man, 2009]) and the oneiric, spiritual odyssey that followed them (O Ornitólogo [The Ornithologist, 2016]). While Rodrigues is the exclusive director of these better-known feature films, the “Asian films” are joint directorial efforts with Guerra da Mata, Rodrigues's art designer and occasional co-writer. The collaboration is based in part on Guerra da Mata's biographical connection to Macao, where he spent his childhood. The “Asian films” are the first ones that Rodrigues produced on digital video rather than in his preferred format of celluloid, and he made them with a small crew, rather than with the larger ensembles that he used in the narrative features. Beyond such particularities of production, other traits differentiate the Asian Trilogy from the rest of his films. While Rodrigues's single-author titles emphasize the protagonists’ corporeality, the jointly-made “Asian films” tend to elide it. The characters in A Última Vez Que Vi Macau (The Last Time I Saw Macao, 2012) remain off-screen, or are replaced with animals. The individual protagonists of the feature films are replaced in the Macao films by unseen or vague collective subjects, such as the market vendors and customers of Alvorada Vermelha (Red Dawn, 2011), or the factory workers and anonymous Macanese crowds of Iec Long (2015). The fictional orientation of earlier and subsequent features is abandoned in the Asian titles in favor of documentary (in Red Dawn) or of a combination of essay film, fiction, and actuality (in Iec Long and The Last Time I Saw Macao). The documentary gestures hark back to Rodrigues's early career, and in particular to his diptych Esta É a Minha Casa (This Is My Home, 1997) and Viagem à Expo (Journey to Expo, 1998), about a migrant Portuguese family living in Paris and their holiday trips to their country of origin. At the same time, the nocturnal ambience of the “Asian films”, their focus on marginal characters or little-noticed corners of social life, and their cinephiliac allusiveness—especially prominent in The Last Time I Saw Macao—align them with the rest of the directors’ titles.