A woman who has spent years in concentration camps goes back to her native town (in her imagination) and tries to find members of her dead mother’s family.
Category: Arthouse
The third installment of Oliveira’s Tetralogy is a brilliant and devastating portrait of young lovers tragically separated by a bitter feud between their aristocratic families. In Doomed Love Oliveira tested his belief in a creative merging of theatrical, literary and cinematic narrative traditions. His radical approach to adaptation captures the multilayered language of Camilo Castelo Branco’s eponymous epic novel to offer a virtual phenomenology of life and love in 18th century Portugal. After a disastrous premiere on Portuguese television, the theatrical release of Oliveira’s re-edited version was quickly hailed as a landmark in the history of the European art film.
This is the story of a young man at the dawn of the 21st century. He belongs to the most vulnerable, most futile and most appealing segment of society. Raoul flits from woman to woman, searching for seemingly unattainable love, until he meets Jeanne, who is fated to live freely and tragically.
In Switzerland, German singer Willie falls in love with Jewish composer, Robert, who offers resistance to the Nazis by helping refugees. But his family thinks Willie is a Nazi and may be a risk for them. One day Willie helps Robert but, has to stay in Germany. As Willie starts to sing the song ‘Lili Marleen’ she becomes very famous and every soldier hears that song via radio – even Hitler wants to meet her, but she still does not forget Robert, and helps to smuggle photos of concentration camps to the free Switzerland. Robert wants to visit her, but is captured. Will never see Willie again until war is over.
A film about the imagination. The present of man is extremely limited. He has been excluded from the future and even the past is nothing more than a source of gentle memories. Without bitterness he tries to make a last move. A move that may not actually exist, but gives some hope for a wildcard.
Oliveira returned to the center of Portugal’s film scene in the 1960s with Acto da Primavera, a work that marks a significant change in the director’s trajectory and that initiates some of the cinematic strategies that he would develop more fully in later films. In Acto da Primavera, Oliveira offers a version of a popular representation of the Passion of Christ, enacted by members of a rural community in northern Portugal, derived from the Auto da Paixão de Jesus Cristo (1559), by Francisco Vaz de Guimarães.
The lives of the affluent residents of an exclusive town in the French countryside converge at a chateau owned by Marie-Agnes de Bayonette, a feisty, physically disabled woman, and maintained by her elderly cousin, Solange. When de Bayonette dies suddenly, cultures and personalities clash as an international cast of characters — including real estate vultures, bargain hunters and numerous distant cousins — descend upon the chateau.