Based on the traditional Portuguese tales A Donzela que vai à guerra and A Mão do finado. In Portugal during the Middle Ages, the elderly Dom Raimundo decides to marry off his daughter Silvia to a rich neighbor. He goes to the royal court to invite the king to the wedding. But in his absence, Silvia disguises herself by becoming a soldier named Silvestre.
Tag: PORTUGAL
An adaptation of the renowned Portuguese Letters, originally written in French and attributed to Soror Mariana Alcoforado. As letters may have been written by Soror, in the Convent of Nossa Senhora da Conceição in Beja, to her lover Noel Bouton, Count of Chamilly.
1943. A bourgeois family spends part of their Easter vacation in an old family home near a fishing village, close to the beach. On the first floor of the house lives temporarily a Belgian woman with two young children, a refugee from the war raging in Europe. Life is mundane until, from the mist one morning, two men emerge from the beach, one of them wounded. They are one of the pilots and the helmsman of a British fighter plane that crashed into the sea…
O Sangue (Blood), tells the story of seventeen-year-old Vincente and his ten-year-old brother, Nino, who must face the departure of their abusive father and its aftermath. With the aid of Vicente’s girlfriend, Clara, the trio attempts to pick up the pieces of their fractured family life while confronting an unwelcomed uncle and mobsters who try to collect debt that their father left behind.
Albert is an introverted travel agent living a lonely life in New York. When Louie, his best friend from childhood, appears having just escaped from prison, Albert’s quiet existence is permanently disrupted. what ensues is one long, crazy night in New York that will change both their lives forever.
Os Mutantes examines the lives of three kids in their early teens who have rejected life in juvenile homes or with foster families to take their chances on their own. They drift into petty crime and are exploited by sexual predators; the two boys end up working in a pornographic film, while Andreia becomes pregnant.
In Amanha Lundju, the trees planted upon the birth of each child begin falling rapidly and mysteriously. Led by the tradition healer, Calcalado, the villagers begin a desert exodus in search of the cause of their curse and discover they must return home to fight for their traditions and their old way of life.
Oliveira’s fourth feature, adapted from a play by his close friend José Régio, was one of his major breakthroughs as a filmmaker: a fable about a deeply sheltered young woman who tells her wealthy, religious parents that she’s been impregnated in the wake of an angelic visitation. It’s possible to take Benilde, or the Virgin Mother as a scathing denouncement of religious hypocrisy, a veiled response to the abuses of the Salazar regime, or a set of obsessive, carefully staged formal exercises—or some combination of the three.