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The twelfth entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Mubi will be showing João Pedro Rodrigues's To Die Like a Man (2009) March 4 - April 2 and Two Drifters (2005) March 5 - April 3, 2016 in the United States.The concept that unifies the work of Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues (signed alone or in collaboration with João Rui Guerra da Mata) is that of shifting: a shifting of gender (in any direction from male to female, via all hybrid possibilities in-between), and of genre (romantic melodrama crossed with the fantastique, or documentary sliding over into fiction as in The Last Time I Saw Macao, 2012), even of species (confusion of human and animal realms in O Fantasma, 2000). Most gripping and beguiling of all is the director’s fondness for unexpectedly supernatural themes—all the better to blur the distinction between mortality and immortality, a key theme...