Mário Barroso

Operation Autumn

A film about General Humberto Delgado's brutal assassination by the Portuguese fascist police in 1965.

The Child

The story takes place near Lisbon, in the mid-16th century. Bela, an adopted young man, tries to find his place in a family that is free, but trapped in a world where each shadow allows imperfections to shine through.

Trois Couples en quête d'orages

Olivier, Rémi and Pascale are three friends who have known each other since childhood. As they approach middle age, they each experience something of a crisis in their lives. Olivier, a doctor before becoming wheelchair bound, faces a bleak future after the break up of two relationships. The fact that Rémi and his wife Estelle are unable to have children puts an increasing strain on their marriage. And Pascale, a filmmaker, is on the point of leaving her husband to pursue an affair with an opportunistic career politician.

Doomed Love

A loner, narcissistic and suicidal teenager attracts most of the people he meets like a fatal aura, a black light. He falls deeply in love with Teresa but does she exist or is she a mere figment, an image, a reflection? Teresa is an apparition. A pretext for an amoral violent uprising, for doomed love.

Fragile as the World

An impossible love. Two young people who love each other. Vera and João can’t find in this life the space, time, or identity to resolve their love story.

God's Comedy

An ice-cream seller lusts after the female employees in his shop.

Lavagante

A story of love and deception, set against a backdrop marked by the actions of the political police under the Salazar dictatorship, censorship, persecution, and imprisonment, and the student revolt of the early 1960s.

Far from Manhattan

Christian, an art critic, must write a study on the painter René Dimanche in order to understand why he did not produce anything for eight years. He asks his friend Ingrid to help him break through this mystery.

Operation Autumn

A film about General Humberto Delgado's brutal assassination by the Portuguese fascist police in 1965.

The Child

The story takes place near Lisbon, in the mid-16th century. Bela, an adopted young man, tries to find his place in a family that is free, but trapped in a world where each shadow allows imperfections to shine through.

Trois Couples en quête d'orages

Olivier, Rémi and Pascale are three friends who have known each other since childhood. As they approach middle age, they each experience something of a crisis in their lives. Olivier, a doctor before becoming wheelchair bound, faces a bleak future after the break up of two relationships. The fact that Rémi and his wife Estelle are unable to have children puts an increasing strain on their marriage. And Pascale, a filmmaker, is on the point of leaving her husband to pursue an affair with an opportunistic career politician.

Doomed Love

A loner, narcissistic and suicidal teenager attracts most of the people he meets like a fatal aura, a black light. He falls deeply in love with Teresa but does she exist or is she a mere figment, an image, a reflection? Teresa is an apparition. A pretext for an amoral violent uprising, for doomed love.

Fragile as the World

An impossible love. Two young people who love each other. Vera and João can’t find in this life the space, time, or identity to resolve their love story.

God's Comedy

An ice-cream seller lusts after the female employees in his shop.

Lavagante

A story of love and deception, set against a backdrop marked by the actions of the political police under the Salazar dictatorship, censorship, persecution, and imprisonment, and the student revolt of the early 1960s.

Far from Manhattan

Christian, an art critic, must write a study on the painter René Dimanche in order to understand why he did not produce anything for eight years. He asks his friend Ingrid to help him break through this mystery.

Abraham's Valley

Ema is a very attractive but innocent girl, so pretty that cars crash in her presence. In her youth she marries Dr. Carlos Paiva, her father's friend, to whom she is not attracted. They move to the valley of Abraham. Carlos loves her, but decides to sleep in a separate room to avoid waking Ema when he has to return late at night. As time goes by she begins to feel unhappy about her marriage, so she finds a new lover.

The Old Man of Belem

Don Quixote, Luís de Camões, Camilo Castelo Branco and Teixeira de Pascoaes meet in an eternal garden in the middle of a modern city and talk about life.

Snow White

Monteiro moved far away from the visual opulence defined by his earlier films with his inspired adaptation of radical Swiss writer Robert Walser’s anti-fairy tale. Carefully restricting the image track, Monteiro maintains an almost totally black screen in order to focus instead on the voices of Snow White, the Prince, the Queen and the Hunter, engaged in an extended debate about love, free will and the events leading up to the fateful attempt on the maiden’s life. Despite its visual austerity, Snow White is haunted by the arresting images with which it begins – infamous black-and-white photographs of Walser lying dead in the snow after his heart attack outside a Swiss asylum at the age of seventy-eight, a strange realization of the “death of the author” so central to postmodern literary criticism.

The Life of Mirrors

The Life of Mirrors is one of the sections of the exhibition Luis Miguel Cintra - Small Theatre of the World. A commission by Serralves Foundation to Regina Guimarães and Saguenail, and constructed after an unpublished interview with Luis Miguel Cintra, this film is the result of a long and painstaking exercise of selecting and editing excerpts from films by Manoel de Oliveira in which Cintra participates as an actor. In this way, The Life of Mirrors is a reflective, retrospective essay film, which opens the Carte Blanche, thus establishing a gateway to Luis Miguel Cintra's cinematographic and cinephile career.

The Killers

"Kilas" (a Portuguese misrepresentation of the English word "killers") is the nickname of a petty con-man who gets involved with a deadly ring of spies.

Aqui D'El Rei!

At the end of the nineteenth century, an army force led by Major Mouzinho de Albuquerque, a cavalry officer, imprisoned in Mozambique the tribal chief Gungunhana, who had rebelled against Portuguese government and sovereignty. Mouzinho instantly becomes a national hero but his raising popularity worries the State.

The Lisbon Thief

There is a special brigade dedicated to camera thefts in Lisbon. Few cameras are found, although sometimes tapes are thrown in the gutter like lost memories. Policemen watch these tapes hoping to find clues in this flow of touristic and intimate video recordings. One image leads the investigation to France.

Oh Lisboa, Meu Lar

A journey inside the tram crossing the city of Lisbon while listening to fragments of Fernando Pessoa's poetry.

Francisca

The life of a young man, son of an English officer who lets himself become a prisoner of love resulting in fatalism and disgrace.

The Cannibals

This odd film is a major representative of an even odder film genre: direct-to-celluloid opera. It was commissioned by the Portuguese master of style, director Manoel de Oliveira from composer João Paes. Musically, it ranges from 19th-century romanticism to popular, modernist and even "post-modernist" styles. In the initially tame story, a host-narrator tells the story of a wedding between the two lovebirds: Viscount d'Aveleda and the beautiful Marguerite. However, what happens in the bridal chamber is incredibly bizarre. The events after that are even stranger, and the wedding guests and family indulge in cannibalism, among other perversions.

Come and Go

João Vuvu, lives alone in a house that requires regeneration but due to being alone he is unable to do the work. On his son's release from prison and João's ensuing deception triggers a series of somber events.

The Spousals of God

After receiving a visit from a messenger of God, João de Deus wins his buddy's girlfriend through a roll of the dice.

My Case

Manoel de Oliveira plays his film in three stages: the first part - a play, the second can be roughly defined as a silent film (with the behind the scenes read excerpts from Beckett works), but in the end the director brilliantly performs the same material of the avant-garde exercise. Surprisingly, a joke, repeated three times, each time everything sounds fresh and develops into an almost verbatim adaptation of the biblical "Book of Job" - a spectacular point in a parable about how hard to empathize with other people's misery, when you have your own.

Km 224

Mário and Cláudia are going through a divorce process. When Cláudia accepts job in another country, situation will lead parents to reassess many of their certainties and question the effects on the happiness of their children.

A Woman's Revenge

Roberto is one of those men to whom simulation has become the greatest art. He is an unmoved, inscrutable, mysterious man. But the truth is that Robert feels an intimate, deep tedium. The boredom of those who have already exhausted all the pleasures of life. The only thing still surprising him is the fact that nothing surprises him anymore. One evening he has an overwhelming encounter with a woman. For his own bewilderment, he discovers the sublime horrors in which the woman has sank.

President's Target

The lone survivor of a deadly ambush against him and his team, a narcotics agent swears to avenge the deaths of his friends and fellow officers.