Portugal has ceased to be the magnet which attracted foreign film-makers fascinated by its history and culture. Instead, from the year 2000 onwards, it has become one of the most important focal points for film-lovers on the international stage. Following in the footsteps of figures such as Manoel de Oliveira, Paulo Rocha and João César Monteiro, 21st century Portuguese cinema has unleashed a wave of new sharpshooters, confirming the prediction made by the French critic Serge Daney more than thirty years ago. The result is that, despite its manifest financial limitations, this new Portuguese cinema is functioning as an aesthetic laboratory which enables the possible future of European cinema to be studied and even predicted, while at the same time being able to consider the present and the past of its country of origin.
The eight Portuguese film-makers who are the focus of this book consider different aspects of Portuguese history from the perspective of memory, whether individual or collective, whether the memory is that of the characters they portray or, more directly, the memories evoked by the images shown of times past. For all of them, memory is a prism through which the past and identity can be viewed critically, whether the memories they bring are of dark times, such as in the cinema of João Canijo and Susana de Sousa Dias, or whether the memories give rise to venomous jokes, such as in the films by João Nicolau and Miguel Gomes. Most of the time, however, the use of memories is also a reaffirmation of the individual, whether this is a character, such as in the Pedro Costa’s Letters from Fontainhas trilogy, or even the film-makers themselves, such as is the case with João Rui Guerra da Mata in The Last Time I Saw Macao and Gonçalo Tocha in É na Terra não é na Lua.
Horacio Muñoz Fernández
Iván Villarmea Álvarez
Editors of Jugar con la memoria. El cine portugués en el siglo XXI
The presentation of the book will be accompanied by a short series of screenings of representative films of this latest generation of Portuguese film-makers. All of the sessions will be introduced by members of the cinema criticism association A Cuarta Parede, who will also moderate the debates with the film-makers.
Friday 4 at 7:30 pm. Sala 2
Iván Villarmea Álvarez
Editors of Jugar con la memoria. El cine portugués en el siglo XXI