Favorite Portuguese Feature Films
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- DirectorJosé Leitão de BarrosStarsRosa MaríaOliveira MartinsAdelina AbranchesFalacha is the captain of a fishing boat of Nazaré who lost part of his men in a shipwreck. Among them was the husband of Aunt Aurélia, who holds Falacha responsible for this tragedy. A few years later, Maria, Falacha's daughter, falls in love with Manuel, Aurélia's son, which makes the two young people the new Romeo and Juliet. As for Falacha, he succumbs to social pressure and commits suicide...
- DirectorManoel de OliveiraStarsNascimento FernandesVital dos SantosAntónio PalmaThe story takes place in the old streets of Porto and by the banks of the Douro River. A gang of very young kids has just accepted a new member, Carlitos, a shy boy who has "played it tough" by stealing a doll in a shop. Carlitos soon has a crush on Terezinha, the only girl in the group. The trouble is that Eduardo, the gang boss, is also in love with the pretty girl. And he will not allow any rival to challenge him.
- DirectorPaulo RochaStarsIsabel RuthRui GomesPaulo Renato19-year-old Julio has just left the provinces to settle down in the outskirts of Lisbon. He lives in a poor area with his uncle Afonso 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. The two young people, although very different from each other, embark on an idyll.
- DirectorFernando LopesStarsBelarmino FragosoJean Pierre GeblerMaria Teresa de NoronhaInterview with a has-been boxing champion «who could have been great», probing, and soul revealing.
- DirectorPaulo RochaStarsGeraldo Del ReyIsabel RuthMaria BarrosoAfter a stint in the army fighting in Angola, a soldier comes home to find his sweetheart has married his brother. He makes advances towards his sister-in-law, but she turns him down. Discouraged, the man meets a new girlfriend who vows to escape the town's crushing poverty even if she has to steal. The two begin a relationship but the film does not indicate what their future may hold.
- DirectorAntónio da Cunha TellesStarsMaria CabralMiguel FrancoRuy de CarvalhoA look at the urban society of the seventies. The story of Marta a young and pretty girl, who leaves her husband to search for her true identity. She doesn't quite know what she wants, but at least she knows what she's escaping from. Soon she encounters financial difficulties and finds herself involved with shady characters, a situation that leads to a mysterious murder. The net closes around her.
- DirectorFernando LopesStarsLaura SoveralJoão GuedesZita DuarteA married couple of rich and depressed noblemen destroy the lives of their servants out of spite.
- DirectorThomas HarlanJacques d'ArthuysAnna DevotoStarsThomas HarlanMaria VitóriaJosé Neves PaivaThe rise and fall of a revolutionary cooperative movement established in a large private farm in Ribatejo, Portugal, from March to December 1975 (most part of the land occupations occurred in Alentejo, promoted by the communist party). In direct speech, sometimes to the camera, sometimes among themselves, the uneducated rural workers expose their misery, their suffering, their hopes, and ultimately their despair - when a socialist government orders the restitution of the land to their primitive owners, and these transform the land into a hunting reserve.
- DirectorMargarida CordeiroAntónio ReisStarsAlbino S. PedroCarlos MargaridoMariana MargaridoIt's a docudrama with a poetic writing and non-linear narrative. Specifically, it's an "etnofiction": portraits the typical characters of Terra Fria, the North-east of Portugal, showing secular habits, in a majestic rural ambient. It's one of the works that represents the New Cinema (Novo Cinema) portuguese movement, and one of the first portuguese docudrama.
- DirectorJoão César MonteiroStarsManuela de FreitasLuís de Sousa CostaFrancisco DominguesFor his feature debut Monteiro creatively borrowed from traditional Portuguese legends to craft a series of echoing, parallel tales of young couples desperately escaping cruel false fathers, each couple on the run across different regions of the country and during increasingly contemporary time periods. A lyrical and profoundly cinematographic allegory with a glistening sharp political edge, Paths traces a pattern of repressive authority across Portuguese history while also pointing, with cautious optimism, towards the steady presence of youthful resistance. With its stunning choreography of landscape and use of a poetic, associative structure to evoke the longue durée of mythical time, Paths anticipates Monteiro's mid-career masterpiece Silvestre.
- DirectorJosé Álvaro MoraisStarsMário Cesariny de VasconcelosArpad SzenesGuy WellenThe film documents the places where Portuguese Vieira da Silva, and Hungarian Arpad Szenes were born, met, and lived together, painting, and living to each other.
- DirectorManuela Serra"Its uniqueness defines also a model - of cinema, of auteur, of a country, of a time - if that model could be established under the form of vagueness and of incompleteness."
- DirectorJosé Fonseca e CostaStarsAssumpta SernaRaul SolnadoPatrick BauchauIn Portugal, in the 60s, the corpse of a man appears on Dog's Beach. The corpse is identified as the major Dantas, a man wanted by authorities after his escape from a military prison where he was awaiting trial for insurrection.
- DirectorJosé Álvaro MoraisStarsFernando HeitorPaula GuedesLuís LucasSet four years after the Portuguese revolution and the simultaneous loss of the Portuguese empire in Africa, the story concerns a director who sells guns to finance his play.
- DirectorJoão César MonteiroStarsJoão César MonteiroManuela de FreitasRuy FurtadoLisbon, 1989. A middle-aged poor idiot, tormented by an illness, lives in a cheap room in a family boarding house, in the old section of the city's waterfront.
- DirectorManoel de OliveiraStarsLeonor SilveiraCécile Sanz de AlbaLuís Miguel CintraEma is a very attractive but innocent girl, so pretty that cars crash in her presence. Young marries Dr. Carlo Paiva, who she is not attracted to, but is her father's friend. They move to the Valley of Abraham. Carlo loves her, but decides to sleep in a separate room, to avoid waking Ema when he has to return late at night. With time she begins to feel unhappy about her marriage so, with all the freedom she has, she takes a lover.
- DirectorPedro CostaStarsInês de MedeirosIsaach De BankoléEdith ScobThe film tells a story of Mariana, a nurse who leaves Lisbon to accompany an immigrant worker in a comatose sleep on his trip home to Cape Verde. The devoted Portuguese nurse took a journey only to find herself lost in abstract drama.
- DirectorManoel de OliveiraStarsCatherine DeneuveJohn MalkovichLuís Miguel CintraThe journey of Michael Padovic, an American professor who arrives with his wife, Helene, at a Portuguese convent where he expects to find the documents needed to prove his theory: Shakespeare was born in Spain; not in England.
- DirectorManoel de OliveiraStarsAfonso BonitoCarmen SantosPaulo MatosA photographer is asked by hotel owners to take portraits of their recently deceased daughter.
- DirectorMiguel GomesStarsTelmo ChurroMiguel GomesHortêncílio AquinaA restless retired woman teams up with her deceased neighbor's maid to seek out a man who has a secret connection to her past life as a farm owner at the foothill of Mount Tabu in Africa.
- DirectorJoaquim PintoStarsJoaquim PintoNuno LeonelSerge DaneyJoaquim Pinto, who has been living with HIV for more than two decades, looks back at his life in cinema, at his friendships and loves, at the mysteries of art and nature - while undergoing an experimental drug treatment.
- DirectorMiguel GomesStarsCrista AlfaiateMiguel GomesMartinho CerqueiraSome of the chapters from Arabian Nights are adapted to a modern Portugal in this epic.
- DirectorNuno LeonelJoaquim PintoRabo de Peixe is a fishing village in the Azores. Between 1999 and 2001, Joaquim Pinto and Nuno Leonel shot a documentary there about the disappearing traditional fishing methods. The TV channel which commissioned the film didn't appreciate its critical attitude and broadcasted it only once, in a shorter version. In the meantime, the two directors move to the island, and the industrial fishing methods, supported by Community directives, shake the small village. Fifteen years later, they decide to re-edit the movie following their original intentions, keeping in mind the time that has passed and how their lives have been changed by that place and its inhabitants.
- DirectorCláudia VarejãoStarsMayumi MitsuhashiMasumi ShibaharaMatsumi KoisoA dive, the midday sunlight filtering down through the water. The air in her lungs has to last until she can dislodge the abalone. Dives like these have been carried out in Japan for over 2000 years by the Ama-San.
- DirectorPedro PinhoStarsJosé Smith VargasCarla GalvãoNjamy SebastiãoOne night, a group of workers discover their factory is being dismantled by the same administration that runs it. Quickly, the labourers organize themselves in order to occupy the plant.