Fado, História d'uma Cantadeira

This film tells the story of Ana Maria, a fado singer from very humble beginnings, and her boyfriend Júlio. Ana turns out to be famous, and fame brings other love interests and a new life. Directed by Perdigão Queiroga, this film has screenplay by Armando Vieira Pinto and the cast is headed by Amália Rodrigues (as Ana Maria), Virgílio Teixeira (as Júlio), Vasco Santana (as Joaquim Marujo) and António Silva (as Chico Fadista).

This movie, despite being one of the greatest classics of Portuguese cinema, has two very curious features: the first is that the story of main character is almost a biography of the actress who embodies it, the great fado singer Amália Rodrigues, for which the film brought even more fame and success. The second feature is the apology of fado as a kind of "national song". Fado is a music genre originally born in Lisbon's brothels and taverns, where people used to drown his sorrows and sailors forget their loneliness. It's a sad, nostalgic, melancholic music that only in the twentieth century, through government policy and propaganda, went viral in the country. Nonetheless, no one denies the beauty of fado, the depth of its ballads and letters. This film, although its propaganda to an idea that was wrong at that time, deserves place in the heart of the Portuguese because this did happen, over the decades.