“The festival in Coimbra seeks to connect artists, audiences, and educational influencers. Additionally, some of the 130 short and feature films showcased from November 16 to 23 have been screened at various regional locations, including the once-trendy seaside resort of Figueira da Foz.”
In its 30th edition, the Caminhos do Cinema Português festival highlighted the fact that while Portuguese cinema has garnered international acclaim at festivals for decades, the local audience, both young and old, remains largely unaware or uninterested. Therefore, the festival in Coimbra aims to bridge the gap between artists, audiences and (school) multipliers. In addition, some of the 130 short and feature-length films presented from November 16 to 23 will be shown at several regional venues as well as at the formerly fashionable seaside resort of Figueira da Foz.
The festival provided a concentrated opportunity to view nearly the entire 2023/24 feature film line-up, excluding a few box-office successes hits. Paulo Cunha and Daniel Ribas, two critical analysts of new Portuguese cinema, emphasize the significance of blending documentary and fictional storytelling, alongside numerous high-quality short films. They mention Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes as exemplary figures.
A striking number of the films selected by festival director Tiago Santos and his team focused on the Carnation Revolution of 1974 and its lingering effects. At the time, a politically and ideologically driven auteur cinema challenged the traditional viewing habits of audience following the political upheavals.
Let us not forget: Paulo Rocha’s films of the Portuguese Cinema Novo, The Green Years (Os Verdes Anos; 1963) and Change of Life (Mudar de Vida; 1966), already addressed the socio-economic hardship of both bourgeois middle class and the general populace. António Campos’ The Invention of Love (A Invenção do Amor; 1965) about the curse of emigration and the frustration of love describes the feelings of a country “where everything fails and sinks into a gentle deathly sleep”.
These films depict a society in transition, bidding farewell to the past and attempting to inspire a disillusioned youth with everyday life’s poetry. This and other films anticipated the urge for liberation, the nearly bloodless revolution of April 25, 1974, indirectly describing two constants for the decades of consistency of the fascist dictatorship of Lusitanian character: corruption and involvement of representatives of the Catholic Church and the ubiquitous secret police PIDE.
From the past to the present
With a retrospective lens on the often-romanticized Carnation Revolution, several productions stood out at this year’s Caminhos do Cinema Português festival. Sempre by Italian-born director Luciana Fina uses archive footage from the Lisbon Cinematheque and the Portuguese television station RTP to transition from Mussolini’s black shirts to the emerging Salazar state. The imagery of state trials, the secret police, and a frightened population recall the spirit of new beginnings. The production, which won the Jury Grand Prize in Coimbra, offers a compelling and complex portrayal of Portugal’s transformation from 1962 to 1983.
It addresses inadequate housing, worker exploitation in factories and by landowners, social injustices, educational deficits, the hindered emancipation of women, and a culture under constant threat from secret police censorship. These historical sounds and images are contrasted with current climate change movements and student strikes. Of course, the film doesn’t end without the song “Grândola, Vila Morena”, which became the theme tune of the revolution. For young officers, worn by colonial wars, led by General Spínola, it was a call to rebel against President Marcelo Caetano, the last representative of the 48-year dictatorship.
The half-hour documentary Ó Manel! Há uma revolução em Lisboa by Tiago Cravidão offers a completely different female perspective on those days. It gives voice to 13 women from the rural areas around Coimbra, discussing their everyday lives, their private lives, and reactions to the coup, far from Lisbon. The spatial, cultural, socio-political, and economic distance and difference is suddenly noticeable. On April 25, 1974, while on a sunny Thursday, demonstration of neatly dressed people accompanied and enthusiastically celebrated the soldiers adorned with carnations in the streets of Lisbon, celebrated enthusiastically, one woman interviewed was tending plants in the field, another preparing lunch, a third was driving into town, and others were exchanging views with neighbors, seeing the local surveillance machinery of the secret police PIDE for the first time.
The enthusiastic political adventurers from Europe who traveled to the country to experience the Portuguese revolution first-hand certainly reacted to these different perceptions of the revolution – often unaware of the language, the culture, and the lack of modernity in the so-called poorhouse of Europe. In a country that had robbed its people, especially in the provinces, of its elite and future through a senseless colonial war.
In their documentary À Mesa da Unidade Popular, Mozambican filmmakers Isabel Noronha and Camilo de Sousa explore how the fatal intentions behind the establishment of a new state and the concept of the “new” socialist human being in the newly independent colonies led to their being marginalized. After Mozambique’s 1975 independence, the Frelimo movement created an intimidation system based on ideology. For the first time, a devastating chapter of political and social paternalism is revealed, one that condemned the dreams of individual agency to failure. This credible, nuanced documentary draws its power from the dramatic personal stories of the lives and fates of its protagonists.
The film For You, Portugal, I Swear! (Por ti, Portugal, eu juro!) by Sofia da Palma Rodrigues and Diogo Cardoso describes the almost unknown chapter of African soldiers who fought on the Portuguese side during the colonial war in Guinea-Bissau against the native population and were ignominiously forgotten and declassified after the declaration of independence. It is a fact-based investigation into historical memory and collective responsibility.
Director Dulce Fernandes offers a poetic reflection on Portuguese colonial times with Tales of Oblivion (Contos do Esquecimento) spoken over images of the findings of an archaeological excavation in front of the city walls of Lagos in the Algarve. During the construction of a parking garage and mini-golf course, skeletons were discovered there, preserved in the earth, along with priceless artefacts from the slave trade in the 15th century. These are meticulously listed accounting documents of the cruel transport of adults and children, thousands enslaved individuals, who died at sea. Even centuries later, the contemporary idea of the inferiority of the African race, condemned to subordination and without rights, is still justified with little concealed classification. The film thus shines a spotlight on the entire European colonial history, which restitution of looted art and lip service to the recognition of historical guilt, often combined with the permission to mine valuable natural resources, cannot be absolved of the bloodstain.
Fictional approaches to the prehistory and aftermath of the colonial declaration of independence.
Banzo, the latest film by Margarida Cardoso, director of The Murmuring Coast (A Costa dos Murmúrios; 2004), deals with the exploitation of African plantation workers on the Sao Tomé and Principe archipelago in the West African Gulf of Guinea. At the beginning of the 20th century, a young doctor is sent to the island to maintain labour of the slaves and heal their self-destructive disease, the pain of their longing for the lost homeland. An attentive photographer captures the cruelties of the living and working conditions with empathetic, expressive shots. The slow-paced film shows a landscape damp with fog and an oppressive atmosphere that holds out no prospect of change.
The Buriti Flower (A Flor do Buriti) by João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora tells of the painful self-discovery process of a Brazilian indigenous population threatened by the colonial structures and the Bolsonaro government for their ancestral settlement areas. The massacre of a small village community by white settlers in 1940 small village community, the survivors pass it on from generation to generation as an oral tribal history. With ancient rituals, they perpetuate the preservation of identity and resilience into the reality of today. In the spirit of women’s power, the film ends with a hopeful demonstration in the capital Brasilia, supported by authentic footage linking past and present.
Manga d’Terra by Basil da Cunha shows the arduous, but ultimately encouraging path of a young woman from Cape Verde who has to make her way in a Lisbon slum in order to find a future for herself and her children in her homeland. Her musical talent and a supportive female community, spark hope. The unconditional will to survive in the midst of a milieu dominated by gangsters, raids and intolerance ignites a veritable firework of infectious spontaneity and refreshing emotionality.
In 2012, often called a year zero in Portuguese cinema, many technicians and artists were unemployed. Producer Luís Urbano, who worked on films by Manoel de Oliveira and Miguel Gomes, maintains: “Investing in Portuguese cinema means investing in the identity, culture, and memory of a country. Cinema is the only way to capture images and sounds of what memory is in the remembrance of a country.”
Josef Nagel
Edited by Rita Di Santo
© FIPRESCI 2024