
Tribute to Paulo Rocha’s 1963 classic “The Green Year”Read More »
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Inquietude, also known as Anxiety, is a movie in three parts; a one-act play, a short story, and a fable, bringing them all together brilliantly. It may seem talky at first, but there is some genuine thought going on behind the talk, and some of the images are gorgeous.Read More »
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Paulo Rocha’s haunting second feature, CHANGE OF LIFE, is a beautifully-told story of a young man who returns from abroad to his small fishing village to discover that much has changed. Inspired by his work with Manoel de Oliveira, Rocha “cast” the local villagers as themselves, interspersed with experienced actors led by the great Isabel Ruth who would go on to become an Oliveira regular and an iconic presence in Pedro Costa’s OSSOS. The poetry of the local vernacular is captured in the textured dialogue written by fellow Portuguese filmmaker Antonio Reis, who met Rocha through Oliveira. The film was a critical and commercial success upon release, though it would effectively be the last film Rocha made for nearly two decades.Read More »
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1920s. Vitalino, a small farmer from São Vicente sees his father die of the epidemic which decimated the country. Some years later, of all the brothers, Vitalino is the strongest and takes his father’s place in the house. But the village is too small for his aspirations and he decides to head to Brazil, leaving his sisters in charge of the household. In parallel with Vitalino’s story, If I Were a Thief… I’d Steal portrays the world of Paulo Rocha rummaging through his films and ghosts over the years.Read More »
Julio, aged nineteen, has just left the provinces to settle down in the outskirts of Lisbon. He lives there in a poor area with his uncle Raul and starts working as an apprentice shoemaker. At the shop, he gets to know Ilda, a young housemaid and regular customer. Ilda is pretty, joyful and modern and Julio falls for her.Read More »
Social class, prideful martyrdom, and a dollop of beautifully expansive landscape weave a tale of operatic proportions, both by plot and physically exhaustive standards, in veteran Manoel de Oliveira’s latest exploration of motivation. Marrying for money instead of childhood love, Camila (Leonor Baldaque) naïvely assumes the supposed epic and selfless attributes of Joan of Arc to deal with her husband’s infidelity and the consistent treatment of being irrelevant to the very people that encouraged the doomed match.Read More »
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An elderly woman in a wheelchair and a hormone driven teenage boy arrive to a beach cabin where, through rare moments of lucidity, she will persuade him to kill her.Read More »
Jorge is the doctor in charge of the Haematology Department of a big hospital. One day he meets Clarisse, a patient suffering from advanced leukaemia, and falls in love with her. His struggle to save her inevitably fails in the end, and Jorge will now have to deal with a future of pointless routine and despair.Read More »