Favorite Portuguese Feature Films

Falacha 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...

The 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.

19-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.

Interview with a has-been boxing champion «who could have been great», probing, and soul revealing.

After 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.

A 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.

A married couple of rich and depressed noblemen destroy the lives of their servants out of spite.

The 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.

It'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.

For 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.

The 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.

"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."

In 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.

Set 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.

Lisbon, 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.

Ema is a very pretty, innocent girl. She marries Dr. Carlo Paiva. They settle in the Valley of Abraham. Little by little, Ema becomes unhappy in her marriage and, taking advantage of her freedom, she takes a lover.

The 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.

The 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.

The film follows the daily life of Vanda Duarte, a heroin addict in Lisbon, and the community she lives in.

David, married with a daughter, is about to leave Portugal with his family, but first has to stop by his home village for his grandfather's burial. There he meets his cousin's wife Ana, who intrigues him.

A photographer is asked by hotel owners to take portraits of their recently deceased daughter.

A 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.

Joaquim 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.

The viper is deaf and the scorpion can't see, so it is and so shall be, the same way the countryside is peaceful and the city bustling and the human being impossible to satisfy. Lacrau demands the return 'to the curve where man got lost' in a journey from the city towards nature. The escape from chaos and emotional void we call progress; matter without spirit, without will. The search for the most ancient sensations and relationships of mankind. The amazement, the fear of the unknown, the loss of basic comforts, loneliness, the meeting with the other, the other animal, the other vegetable. A dive looking for a connection with the world. Where beginning and end are the same, but I am not.

Some of the chapters from Arabian Nights are adapted to a modern Portugal in this epic.