Vergílio Ferreira

The life and work of the painter Resende. An encounter with social themes and subjects portrayed in the painter's work.

The first time you hear it, it doesn't seem like a big deal. The word is strange and the tone in which it was used could be offensive. In the village the word soon spreads and as it passes from mouth to mouth it becomes heavier and takes on a markedly offensive character. As the village gets angrier, all the small misunderstandings in everyday life become serious business. There is only one solution: exposing the cases and their origin - the word barely heard and poorly said - which, today, in the village, is the most devastating offense that can be thrown at our greatest enemy.

A writer becomes the main character in the story he intended to write

Mário Gonçalves, a high school teacher threatened with death due to cancer, spends the last days of his life in the village where he was born, in the heart of Serra da Estrela. There, he expresses his talent as a painter in the intimate decoration of an abandoned chapel. This is also the twilight hour of rebellious memories: love and precariousness, choices and contingency, perennial dissatisfaction...

Estefânia is an old, rich, strict catholic woman, and when she sets her eyes on a couple of servants who have no means to bring up properly their youngest son, António, she decides to move her influences in order to make a priest out of him. The parents accept it, the local priest and even the Seminar's rector accept it, and António accepts it - if not for piety, for obeyance to his parents. Once time goes by, and António is out of rural misery and into the prison-like system of a seminar, doubts and anguishes mount within him.