Ruy Furtado

Quote:
PORTUGUESE AFRICA, 1973. Slowly, we have plenty of time: the words of the Second Lieutenant to the small band of soldiers he commands. A land mine exploding on the forest track, the patrol lost in the forest. The death of a soldier, shots in the night. Involved in a war in which the enemy is never seen, the mud-splattered soldiers methodically carry out the final pilgrimage without bitterness or glory, the tame farewell of a generation to five centuries of Portuguese presence in Africa: a story of war.Read More »

An angry young man goes to Europe to find his father, a ’60s radical turned doctor in exile.

Doc lives on the edge of Europe where it imperceptibly slides over into the Third World. As a doctor, he knows that the illness he has contracted ten years before in war-torn Africa is getting worse. The diagnosis is cholera, but Doc Knows the disease’s real name: despair. His thoughts about his failed struggle for justice and ideals are drowned regularly in alcohol. On the other side of the world lives Jimmy, a speed-loving motorbike freak who, when his mother dies, finds a letter from Doc and discovers that his father, whom he thought was dead, is still alive. The encounter of the two men leads to a reappraisal of two worlds in opposition.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 »

Synopsis:
This quirky Portuguese comedy won a silver lion at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. The story concerns the irrepressible Joao de Deus (played by the director, Joao Cesar Monteiro), an ill-kempt, lusty and none-too-honest resident of Violeta’s boarding house, which happens to have yellow walls. Joao, who has no visible means of support, is in his fifties, and is not above cadging money from his 70 year old mother, who still works as a cleaning lady. He has a wistful sort of lust for the young ladies in the boarding house, and gets a kind of thrill when he is permitted to take a bath in their used water. Read More »