Acácio de Almeida

Acácio de Almeida

Birth : , Souto, Portugal

History

Acácio de Almeida (born 29-06-1938) is a Portuguese cinematographer best known for his work with João César Monteiro, Raúl Ruiz, Alain Tanner, Valeria Sarmiento and Rita Azevedo Gomes.

Profile

Acácio de Almeida

Movies

Mãos no fogo
Director of Photography
The young film student Maria do Mar is working on a documentary about the old manor houses along the Douro River. It is the final project in her thesis on “Reality in Cinema”. Maria has an unlimited confidence in what is visible. Her candour and her naivety allow her to see the bright side of life – such as the beauty of the landscape and the authenticity of the place, or what’s left of it. But when Maria enters the final manor house on her list, she soon realises that something is going on in this house that is not as innocent as it first seemed. The manor is truly a house of horrors.
Love Lights
The evocation of light in the cinema leads the Character of the Man of Light to ponder over it, over its essence and its multiple manifestations in a revisitation of geographical places and memories.
Love Lights
Writer
The evocation of light in the cinema leads the Character of the Man of Light to ponder over it, over its essence and its multiple manifestations in a revisitation of geographical places and memories.
Love Lights
Director
The evocation of light in the cinema leads the Character of the Man of Light to ponder over it, over its essence and its multiple manifestations in a revisitation of geographical places and memories.
Vieirarpad
Director of Photography
VIEIRARPAD begun with the correspondence between the couple Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szènes, between 1932-1961. The letters and the intimacy of their words are pretext for the exploration of an equally intimate visual journey
Vencidos da Vida
A compilation of films project multiple versions of people won by vida.
Adeus Senhor António
Director of Photography
Film adaptation of "The letter from the hunchback to the locksmith" by Fernando Pessoa's heteronym Maria José.
Take Me Home
Director of Photography
A group of strangers comes to a monastery in Utah for a month-long stay. The monastery has two guidelines: no people-pleasing and no private thoughts. They find themselves opening up to each other in ways they never could have imagined.
Danses Macabres, Skeletons, and Other Fantasies
Two film directors and a writer are in Portugal for an expedition through various images, moments from the history of Western allegorical representation. The writer is Jean-Louis Schefer, and this tale encapsulates his life’s mission.
Danses Macabres, Skeletons, and Other Fantasies
Director of Photography
Two film directors and a writer are in Portugal for an expedition through various images, moments from the history of Western allegorical representation. The writer is Jean-Louis Schefer, and this tale encapsulates his life’s mission.
The Portuguese Woman
Director of Photography
North of Italy, the von Kettens dispute the forces of the Episcopate of Trent. Herr Ketten seeks marriage in a distant country, Portugal. After their honeymoon journey back home, Ketten leaves again for the war. Eleven years elapsed… Rumours are running about the presence of that 'foreigner' in the castle. Some say she's a heretic. Until one day, the Bishop of Trento ends up dying and, with the signature of peace, falls the background of von Ketten's life. Will the Portuguese win, where death seems to be moving in?
The Secret of the Closed House
Cinematography
On the riverside quay of the enormous container port of Lisbon two old decaying sky-blue painted buildings are located directly opposite to each other. One is closed and abandoned, the other inhabited by the two bright and inquisitive girls Ana and Matilde. Watching the closed building every single day and night the sisters get more and more suspicious. Strange phenomenons and movements behind the thick blue walls increase their curiosity. How is possible what their children`s eyes are witnessing? Who are those mysterious neighbours? How to discover old house`s secret?
Rage
Director of Photography
Alentejo, Portugal, 1950. In a desolate region, where the wind seems to speak, where misery and hunger reign over poorest, a desperate man takes his revenge on those who caused his ruin during the darkest night, unable to get honestly the bread needed to feed his family in the daylight.
Antecâmara
Using video assist recorded images, Antecâmara is about the “act” of shooting, the physical reality and ritual energy of two film crews during the preparation for a shot. The first video assist rule is that the image one sees in it has to be more interesting than what one sees outside. Nothing is left to chance. It helps to preview the shot, organise space, arrange the scenes, move the actors and light the set. And it provides it all with a meaning depending on how the camera is used. It is the space-time before the shot, where it is sketched.
Acts of Cinema
Cinema and affections from life in images and what goes on outside the frame. 'Snapshots' of shootings and the present-day memory of directors, actors and technicians.
The Black Book of Father Dinis
Director of Photography
The story of the adventures, in the twilight of the eighteenth century, of a singular couple formed by a little orphan with mysterious origins and his young Italian nurse of a similarly uncertain birth. They lead us in their wake, from Rome to Paris, from Lisbon to London, from Parma to Venice. Always followed in the shadows, for obscure reasons, by a suspicious-looking Calabrian and a troubling cardinal, they make us explore the dark intrigues of the Vatican, the pangs of a fatal passion, a gruesome duel, banter at the court of Versailles and the convulsions of the French Revolution.
How Many Times Have You Dreamt About Me?
Director of Photography
Departing from extracts written by Fernando Pessoa, the characters walk through the city of Lisbon, having the streets and houses where the Poet lived as the background.
Colo
Director of Photography
Struggling against the crisis in Portugal, a mother doubles up jobs to pay the bills since her husband is unemployed. Their teenage daughter tries to keep living everyday life even if the money is running short, which makes everything uneasy. Escaping from their common reality, they slowly become strangers to one another, as the tension grows in silence and in guilt.
A Que Chamas Pensar?
Director of Photography
The plan of issues, since 1962, an alive and continuous legacy of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Escrita Íntima
Director of Photography
Correspondences
Director of Photography
Jorge de Sena was forced to leave his country. First he moved to Brazil, and later to the USA. He never returned to Portugal. During his 20-year-long exile, he kept an epistolary correspondence with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. These letters are a testimony of the profound friendship between the two poets, letters of longing and of desire to “fill years of distance with hours of conversation”. Through excerpts and verses, a dialog is established, revealing their divergent opinions but mostly their strong bond, and their efforts to preserve it until their last breaths.
The Deeds and Sayings of Nasreddin II
Director of Photography
The stories of Nasreddin carry out a reversal of 'point of view' which shatter our established way of seeing things, people, the world and their relationships.
A Vossa Terra
Director of Photography
Using texts and landscapes belonging to Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles and to a life of work dedicated to landscape architecture, João Mário Grilo composes this poetic documentary about the evocative power of nature and man.
O Meu Outro País
Director of Photography
Biographical documentary Solveig Nordlund says that 50 years of life in Portugal. The evolution of Portugal from fascism to the current crisis. A retrospective of his life in Portugal through their films or films in which collaborated. A personal look at the transformation of a country that is not his but who adopted her.
Cinema
A man prepares an old ritual in a temple abandoned by its followers.
Viagem aos Confins de um Sítio Onde Nunca Estive
Himself
“The artist, in his movement towards the ideal, upsets the stability of any one society. Society aspires to achieve stability; the artist aims for infinity. That is the artist’s responsibility and the spiritual sacrifice demanded of him.” Rui Chafes, O Perfume das Buganvílias, 2012 (19).
Viagem aos Confins de um Sítio Onde Nunca Estive
Director of Photography
“The artist, in his movement towards the ideal, upsets the stability of any one society. Society aspires to achieve stability; the artist aims for infinity. That is the artist’s responsibility and the spiritual sacrifice demanded of him.” Rui Chafes, O Perfume das Buganvílias, 2012 (19).
If I Were a Thief... I'd Steal
Director of Photography
1920s. Vitalino, a small farmer from São Vicente sees his father die of the epidemic which decimated the country. Some years later, of all the brothers, Vitalino is the strongest and takes his father’s place in the house. But the village is too small for his aspirations and he decides to head to Brazil, leaving his sisters in charge of the household. In parallel with Vitalino’s story, If I Were a Thief… I’d Steal portrays the world of Paulo Rocha rummaging through his films and ghosts over the years.
Acentuado Arrefecimento Nocturno
Director of Photography
A Woman's Revenge
Director of Photography
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.
Paixão
Director of Photography
A woman recovering from a personal tragedy imprisons a man she met at a party, shutting him in a room of a building demolition.
O Fantasma do Novais
Director of Photography
A Morte de Carlos Gardel
Director of Photography
Inspired in the book with the same title by António Lobo Antunes.
Cisne
Director of Photography
Vera is a singer in her thirties; she is back in Lisbon for the final performance of her concert tour. The heat and beauty of Lisbon makes one want to be happy. Pablo, the companion she selected from among the many who answered her questionnaire, helps her through the sleepless nights. He has no family, but wishes he had. Vera concerns herself with the mysteries surrounding Pablo's life. Vera is not afraid of the night; she is not afraid of anything.
Perdida Mente
Director of Photography
The story of a man who sees his life change radically upon confronting his progressive loss of memory. As his neurological condition advances, it affects not only his own life but the lives of all those who surround him.
Second Life
Director of Photography
Nicholas celebrates his 40th birthday in his country house, with some friends. He has everything he ever wished for, but, on that night, he will end up dead, on his swimming pool. From that moment on, a dead Nicholas wonders how his life would be if he had made a different choice, ten years ago. We then follow two stories: on one hand the police, trying to solve the mystery of Nicholas' death and on the other, Nicholas himself, living a different life. A second life.
The Invisible Collection
Thanks
A story about art and educated men, and how their art and culture reveal themselves useless in the face of the harsh realities of the 20th century life.
Secrets
Director of Photography
After long decades of exile, a leftist former activist returns to Chile to settle accounts with his conscience, related to the death of a colleague and political hero . The task of Atalibar is to reveal his secret. But his view clashes with the current country, godless, far from the old ideologies and where all his old colleagues have changed.
Viúva Rica Solteira Não Fica
Director of Photography
Ana Catarina returns from Brazil with her father and her nanny to marry a man she doesn't know and doesn't like. A terrible coincidence happens when, on the same day, the young woman becomes a widow and an orphan, a fact that leaves her heir to an incalculable fortune and coveted by all the aristocrats in the region.
Lavado em Lágrimas
Director of Photography
João is a freelance television journalist. When he begins a new story about an old pigeon breeder in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon, João meets Ana, his teenage granddaughter, a mysterious character who is beginning to exercise an irresistible fascination for him. With the time João starts to lose the interest in the pigeon breeder and begins to take an interest in Ana and her world, which she only shares with another abandoned kid, until she realizes that her life is full of dark stories.
The Conquest of Faro
Director of Photography
Arriving in a hotel in the city of Faro, a couple learns there are no available tables left. When another couple agrees to share a table, they spark a conversation on the city’s history, unfolding the tales of King Afonso III, who betrays his wife, and of a Moorish woman, who betrays her father.
The Fascination
Director of Photography
An intriguing story about a family and a manor house (where some terrible crimes were committed in the past by a member of that family) adapted from a novel with the same title by Tabajara Ruas.
Altar
Director of Photography
The experimental nature of this film explores the memories of a young love.
That Day
Director of Photography
A father is scheming to have his slightly mental daughter from an earlier marriage killed by allowing a murderous psychopath to be released from the asylum and led to his house. However, the psychopath and the daughter fall for each other.
A Filha
Director of Photography
Ricardo Monteiro is a successful television producer specialising in reality shows. He is 45 years old and he has just received an award for the most popular television show of the year, when he receives an ultimatum from his 18-year-old daughter Leonor. If he does not come home that same evening to celebrate her birthday he will never see her again. Ricardo is distracted by business or other commitments and he is too late for the last flight home. When he returns next day the apartment is empty and Leonor is gone. At first Ricardo thinks that it is only a game, but there are no phone calls or messages and after a while he gets worried and starts looking for her. He discovers that she has quit school without telling him and that she has lost all contact with her old friends. She has become a complete stranger.
Low-Flying Aircraft
Director of Photography
Based on a the short story "Low Flying Aircraft" by J.G. Ballard and set in a near future where humans are dying breed. Judite and André flee to a semi-abandoned apartment complex to protect their mutant child from certain death.
Rending
Director of Photography
A philosophy-obsessed serial rapist stalks a university campus in broad daylight.
Those Facing Us
Director of Photography
In a big isolated house, Mikael, a musician, is composing a psalm. A young woman, Linda, comes to retreive a suitcase belonging to Sébastien, her companion and Mikael's friend. It contains hundreds of photographs from all over the world. While he is travelling, Sébastien has asked Linda to organise the photographs with a view to an exhibition. Mikael invites Linda to reside with him. She accepts. That is the heart of the film – an intertwining of photographs which, juxtaposed by Linda, begin to speak. In parallel with this, Linda receives cassette-letters from Sébastien. A subtle relationship is established between Linda, the young debutante, and Mikael, the man of experience. Mikael goes off to direct his psalm, Linda stays alone. The walls become covered with photographs – wall of happiness, wall of misery – the fight between Good and Evil. Linda learns of the accidental death of Sébastien and stays alone.
Fragile as the World
Director of Photography
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.
Love Torn in Dreams
Director of Photography
A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the convent. These rather ironic paradoxes turn this fairytale into a philosophical fable.
Bad
Director of Photography
Concerns an Irish woman, Cathy (Pauline Cadell), who dearly loves her Portuguese lawyer husband, Pedro (Rui Morisson); however, unbeknownst to her, he engages in one tryst after another. Cathy soon finds herself trying to help a young delinquent get off heroin, while the youth's desperate mother joins a weird religious cult. In other segments, an elderly man is nearly driven mad with grief at the loss of his granddaughter in a train station, while a down-and-out jeweler ushers the young girl to a hotel room.
The Mutants
Director of Photography
Three homeless teenage rejects struggle to survive together. Of them, Andreia is pregnant, while Pedro and Ricardo hustle, steal and are exploited by a pornographer.
L'Inconnu de Strasbourg
Director of Photography
Madeleine is with her lover, Jean-Paul, when her husband arrives home and catches the two together. Madeleine kills her husband and tells Jean-Paul to flee before the police arrive. After Jean-Paul drives away, he picks up a hitchhiker. When the car, stolen by the hitchhiker, explodes, police believe the dead hitchhiker is Jean-Paul. Madeleine takes up with Jean-Paul's brother, Bastien, while Jean-Paul, arriving in Strasbourg, is mistaken for the heir to a fortune. The detective on the case spends more time writing crime novels than investigating real-life crimes.
A Sombra dos Abutres
Executive Producer
Two simple, unassuming, apolitical men have their lives changed forever when they find themselves hunted by agents of the ruling dictatorship.
A Sombra dos Abutres
Director of Photography
Two simple, unassuming, apolitical men have their lives changed forever when they find themselves hunted by agents of the ruling dictatorship.
La novia de medianoche
Director of Photography
A wealthy woman twice widowed, lives with his family and two servants in a shady country house in Galicia in the late nineteenth century isolated from the world to hide a serious incident occurred in the family ten years earlier. This event is subject to certain blackmail the family of which will be released by the arrival at the mansion of two strangers who triggered the investigation of the facts and a change in the future family life.
Land of Storms
Director of Photography
Lena disappears mysteriously during the winter of 1976. This is the last stop on a journey that begins in colonial Mozambique on new year's eve at 1957 gives way to 1958. Ningo, a black boy brought up by Lena's parents, and her childhood friend, comes to Lisbon to help find her, at the request of Lena's mother. Using the letters that Lena has left behind as a testament to her life, in wich she has rebelled against the challenged the powers that be, Ningo discovers the identity of her kidnapper - Jorge Matos - a former secret policeman who has followed her from Lourenço Marques, motivated by morbid desire. Lena's kidnapper dies from two inexplicable snake bites to the neck, in accordance with a legend and ritual that had been part of Lena and Ningo's childhood.
Un asunto privado
Director of Photography
Alex is a famous singer who lives in a big mansion. One quiet night, a hooded stranger comes into his home, shoots the butler and then takes the mask out. Surprisingly, it's a woman. At the beginning she just want to have dinner with him.
La leyenda de Balthasar el Castrado
Director of Photography
At the end of the seventeenth century, in Naples, still dominated by the Spaniards, a young pupil, Balthasar,is castrated to preserve the purity and beauty of his voice. The Duchess dies and her son, the Duke of Arcos, takes charge of the inheritance, which includes Balthasar. With the entrance of Maria Loffredo, former lover of the Duke, a triangle is established that unchains tragic consequences to the allegedly callous life of Balthasar.
Pandora
Director of Photography
It's September in Lisbon… Elsa’s young daughter leaves with her father, and Teresa, a friend’s friend, comes to stay in her room. One night the two women go out and meet Raul, a vagrant lover of Elsa. A triangle takes form. They finish the night on a boat by the name of Pandora, but in the morning Raul sails away, alone. Elsa and Teresa will start a new life...
Runaways
Director of Photography
Two girls meet on a train: Prune is looking for her father whom she has not seen since she was a little girl, Marina is looking for the mother she has never had. Prune learns that her father took his life and then she accidentally dies by drowning. Marina decides to assume her identity and begins a correspondence with Prune's mother.
Poor George
Director of Photography
One night Jorge will meet with a Japanese industrialist, who will allow him to abandon his teaching position and resume his chemical work. However, when he gets home he finds a person there.
Poor George
Associate Producer
One night Jorge will meet with a Japanese industrialist, who will allow him to abandon his teaching position and resume his chemical work. However, when he gets home he finds a person there.
Cold Land
Producer
In the forties, in a little settlement lost amidst the mountains of Trás-os-Montes, Leonardo tries to survive by buying and selling marten and fox furs, dreaming of the day he’ll close a big deal.
Cold Land
Director of Photography
In the forties, in a little settlement lost amidst the mountains of Trás-os-Montes, Leonardo tries to survive by buying and selling marten and fox furs, dreaming of the day he’ll close a big deal.
The Sound of the Shaking Earth
Director of Photography
Freely based on Gide ('Paludes') and Hawthorne ('Wakefield'), this is a film about a writer who never wrote anything and who blows at nightfall the breath of frost. The poem by Carlos Queiroz to which the above sentences belong is not cited in 'O som da Terra a Tremer', but the atmosphere is that, between written letters never received. Fiction within fiction, stories within stories, like those Chinese boxes in which there is always one inside another. Or the two margins of the same river, always being lateral.
Blood
Director of Photography
Nino, tough but sickly, and his older brother Vicente live in the country with their father. After their father disappears ― we’re never sure why ― murder is suggested. Vicente brings his girlfriend to the house, and a different kind of family is established as the three youngsters grow fiercely protective of each other. But their uncle grows suspicious about the fate of the missing father and forcibly kidnaps Nino, taking him away to the city and leaving Vicente to locate him there.
Étoile
Director of Photography
An American ballerina arrives in Hungary to enroll in a ballet school and it soon becomes apparent that things are not what they seem.
Rosa de Areia
Director of Photography
Marking a stylistically and philosophically turn away from the earlier features, The Sand Rose is Reis and Cordeiro’s most abstract, conceptual and literary work. The film’s collage structure gathers texts from multiple sources – including Kafka and Montaigne – and crafts a world of theatrical artifice far from the documentary inspired naturalism of Ana and Trás-os-Montes. Reis and Cordeiro’s least known film has lingered in obscurity and never recovered from the unfairly negative reviews that resulted in its severely limited release. Reis died less than two years later, just as he and Cordeiro were about to begin an ambitious adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo. - Harvard Film Archive
Rosa de Areia
Producer
Marking a stylistically and philosophically turn away from the earlier features, The Sand Rose is Reis and Cordeiro’s most abstract, conceptual and literary work. The film’s collage structure gathers texts from multiple sources – including Kafka and Montaigne – and crafts a world of theatrical artifice far from the documentary inspired naturalism of Ana and Trás-os-Montes. Reis and Cordeiro’s least known film has lingered in obscurity and never recovered from the unfairly negative reviews that resulted in its severely limited release. Reis died less than two years later, just as he and Cordeiro were about to begin an ambitious adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo. - Harvard Film Archive
The Other Night
Director of Photography
When Éric and Marie go to meet their parents at the harbor for the holidays, the latter are victims of an overnight hit-and-run. Marie hides the truth from Éric, investigates the accident alone, and soon finds the presumed culprit.
Agosto
Director of Photography
Summer of 1964. The professor Carlos and the couple Dário and Alda spend time together in the beach during vacations. Away from the colonial war, everything seems lost in time.
The Beggars
Director of Photography
This symbolic drama from director Benoit Jacques underscores the characters' human need for affection. Children steal lemons for the thrill, while women steal other women's men from them just to prove they can. Drug smuggling, clandestine love affairs, and two lovers involved with the production of Shakespeare's Othello carry on with their own off-stage tragedy.
A Flame in My Heart
Director of Photography
The film relates the painful ending of a love story binding an over-30-year-old woman and a North African, and the beginning and end of a relationship she also has with an “established” journalist. The stories illustrate the absolute claim of a woman who can understand love only in terms of life and death, an attitude that generally makes love appear dramatic, but at least burning and flickering, like the flame that glows in her heart.
Balada da Praia dos Cães
Director of Photography
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.
Hovering Over the Water
Director of Photography
Laura Rossellini, a widow from Rome, vacations on the Algarve coast one hot summer. One day while sunbathing, she finds a wounded man named Robert drifting in the surf on a rubber raft. She takes him home, and, after he is revived, learns his story. As they talk, their mutual attraction grows, until a group of armed men suddenly arrive looking for Robert.
Mammame
Cinematography
A Ruizian adaptation of Jean-Claude Gallotta's iconic wordless ballet choreography.
Guardian of the Night
L'infirmier
With an off-beat sense of humor to match its erratic central character, this original comedy-drama features Jean-Philippe Ecoffey as Yves, a young man who works as a cop at night. The catch is that Yves turns to petty crime during the day, partly to impress Aurore (Aurelle Doazan), a nurse he idolizes from afar. His criminal hobby seems hard to understand, since it's doubtful that they will really get him anywhere with Aurore; besides, she already has a boyfriend. Nevertheless, Yves starts out by robbing a post office and ends up trying to run over Aurore's boyfriend, an act which finally gets him into serious trouble.
A Portuguese Farewell
Director of Photography
In Africa, during the colonial war, a patrol is lost in the bush and a soldier dies in operation. Twelve years later, in Portugal, the soldier family meets in peace.
Passagem ou a Meio Caminho
Director of Photography
Ambulatory history, freely inspired by Georg Büchner's biography (1813-37) and the reasons that led him first to political intervention and then to strict isolation. With students of unidentified present time (1968? 1970?), the themes developed, in Büchner, are triggered by the publication of "The Messenger of Hesse", a pamphlet addressed to the peasants, urging them to revolt. Their misunderstanding, as well as the repression of the young revolutionaries, leads Büchner to a particularly skeptical and painful attitude...
Dans un miroir
Cinematography
A man comes to visit an acquaintance who is supposed to be sick and talks to his sister while he is waiting.
Treasure Island
Director of Photography
Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures.
Régime sans pain
Director of Photography
Régime sans pain, influenced by (Ruiz's) friend Jean Baudrillard (and calling) to mind grade-Z SF, grew out of a commission to direct a music video (featuring French cult rock duo of Angèle/Maimone). Ruiz offered a counterproposal that he direct several music videos rather than one; once this deal was made, he shot enough material to interconnect the various videos until he arrived at a feature.
Ninguém Duas Vezes
Director of Photography
Director Jorge Silva Melo has developed a viable, though highly intellectual mystery story about the world of art and culture and murder in this somewhat theatrical presentation. When German artist Bernd Hoffmann (Michael König) arrives in Lisbon to oversee the installation of his paintings in a joint exhibition with another Berlin artist, Hanna Brauer (Charlotte Schwab), Hanna never shows up. Hoffmann is puzzled because he is certain he saw a video sequence with Hanna at the exhibition, and he begins to look for her. Another Lisbon cultural center, a theater, is also having problems that may or may not be related -- and the mystery deepens when Hanna is found dead, either by her own hand, or murdered.
Vertiges
Director of Photography
In a specialized, hermetic drama about love won and lost, not necessarily by the same individuals, novice director Christine Laurent has focused on the backstage melodramas of an opera company. The conductor for an upcoming performance of the Marriage of Figaro has his mind and heart on other matters -- an entrancing diva who keeps him enraptured with her presence and voice. In the meantime, he finds fault with his cast members who cannot, of course, measure up to the woman of his dreams. As singers encounter one problem or another, it is clear that something has to be done about the conductor. Director Laurent designed costumes for both theater and opera, giving her some insight into the venue.
Notre mariage
Director of Photography
A sickly young girl is given away by her father to a childless couple. Twenty years later, she marries her adopted father.
Vidas
Director of Photography
Lives is the story of a middle-aged couple that dwells the night, the heroin and small tricks.
Manoel's Destinies
Director of Photography
When the child Manuel wanders into a garden that is off-limits to him, he meets an unidentified fisherman, and another boy -- the boy is actually himself several years down the road. Manuel experiences three different versions of his encounters in the garden, revealing that fate can have several twists and turns in one's life, depending on decisions that are made early on.
Vanishing Point
Director of Photography
An island retreat. A man, his face bandaged, plays cards nonchalantly. His ex-wife arrives. Conversations happen. (Mubi)
City of Pirates
Director of Photography
A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities.
Circle of Passions
Director of Photography
An aristocratic Sicilian family living in the 1950s. Count Villafratti has sex one night with his nymphomaniac daughter because he thinks she is his wife.
In the White City
Director of Photography
Fed up with the sea, Paul, a Swiss mechanic working in the noisy bowels of a merchant ship, lands in Lisbon.
Gestures and Fragments
Cinematography
"Essay on the Military and the Power", a phrase that also belongs to the title of "Gestures & Fragments", sums up the spirit of the film, based on three points of view on the same theme: Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and Eduardo Lourenço, in their own roles, and the one played by Robert Kramer, as an American journalist bent on seeking explanations for the process of the Portuguese Revolution.
Ana
Director of Photography
Ana combines straight-on documentary technique with unexpected flights of dreamlike surrealism. The title character, played by Ana Maria Martins Guerra, is a young Portuguese girl who lives with her grandmother. Through their relationship, we are witness to the Cycle of Life: Grandmother takes care of granddaughter until granddaughter is obliged to do same for grandmother. The scenes between the two protagonists are counterpointed with impressionistic camera compositions based upon famous religious paintings. Ana was impressive enough to earn an American art-house release, a rarity for independently produced Portuguese films.
Aspern
Director of Photography
A publisher seeks information on a writer who died long ago.
Island of Loves
Director of Photography
This film depicts the life of the 19th-century Portuguese writer Wenceslau De Moraes by means of nine ancient ballads from China. The writer married a Chinese woman after he left his wife and family to go live in Macao. Later, he moved to Japan where he fell in love with a Japanese woman, staying in Japan for the rest of his life. Mixed in with the career and loves of Moraes is the history of Portugal at home and in its colonies.
The Conversation Is Over
Director of Photography
The film was to be a documentary, but evolved during production to a fictional film. It nevertheless adheres strictly to the poems and letters exchanged by two of the most outstanding names of the Modernist Movement, Fernando Pessoa (in Lisbon) and Mário de Sá-Carneiro (in Paris). Their endless conversation was dramatically and suddenly terminated.
Silvestre
Director of Photography
A bewitching combinatory adaptation of the Bluebeard tale and a 15th century Portuguese fable of a damsel who disguises herself as a knight errant.
A Estrangeira
Director of Photography
The shady side of an Italian textile trade in northern Germany is the subject of this slow-paced but atmospheric drama featuring Alberto Sordi as Totonno, a low-level, petty criminal anxious to move up a somewhat crooked ladder. Rising to the rank of the "dons" -- Don Raffaele (Carmine Ippolito) or Don Gennaro (Pasquale Cenammo) -- is not an easy task, as Totonno is about to find out. In the meantime, Paula (Belinda Lee) provides a romantic distraction, and another would-be entrepreneur opts for the straight and narrow. This uneven feature offers some colorful performances but the sum is less convincing than its parts.
Dina and Django
Director of Photography
Dina (Maria Santiago) is a teenager brought up by her grandmother, employed as a housekeeper for a fairly well-off family. Since Dina only has her grandmother, she spends her time fantasizing about her life and reading comic-book love stories -- activities that do nothing to improve her dim perspective of reality. Due to these handicaps and her own inexperience, she gets involved with Django (Luis Lucas), a shady character who decides to use her as bait to attract men and then rob them. One day when both are in a taxi with robbery in mind, the driver gets suspicious so Django shoots him, and so does Dina. She escapes and runs away -- though it seems like she has learned too little too late. This story unfolds against a time of upheaval in Portugal (mid-1970s) when the military government is formulating a constitution and social changes are happening everywhere.
Good Portuguese People
Cinematography
Using film and television footage taken during the revolutionary movement of April 25, 1974 in Portugal, and mixing it with music and live interviews with common people, the director conveys a vivid account of the period in which a military coup evolved to a socialist revolution, then was tempered into a formal European style democracy.
E Não se Pode Exterminá-lo?
Director of Photography
The film of a performance of a selection of cabaret comedy sketches by Karl Valentin, with Jorge Silva Melo as stage director. The show was a complete success and has become almost legendary. Solveig Nordlund shot it, adding some more sketches that weren’t included on the show.
Nem Pássaro Nem Peixe
Director of Photography
A woman translates the front page of H.P. Lovecraft's book “The Silver Key”. Her husband, a journalist, listens. The book describes the conflicts between the real and the imaginary, and tells how Randolph Carter, the film's character, leaves everyday life in search of his childhood dreams.
Trails
Director of Photography
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.
Alexandre e Rosa
Cinematography
A short film.
O Construtor de Anjos
Cinematography
Gothic film in a monastery, where sensual monks murder the children they receive, with images of fantastic, painted from the author own painting and also from the Hammer films and the Saxon plastic tradition of romanticism.
Histórias Selvagens
Director of Photography
An adaptation of two short stories by Passos Coelho, essentially shot in a valley that is a territory threatened by floods, the film is a cinematographic chronicle of the rural worker in the area of Montemor-o-Velho.
Dearest Executioners
Director of Photography
This documentary, filmed clandestinely, is based on several interviews with the executioners who worked in Spain during the early 1970s, as well as families of people executed by them.
The Law of the Land - Alentejo 1976
Director of Photography
The agriculture reforming process, after the 1974 revolution, is seen through an analysis of the social structures and class struggles of the Portuguese society.
Masks
Director of Photography
The film sought to portray a relatively unknown and isolated rural world and, through a highly politicized discourse, affirmed the genuineness of “folk culture.” Representative of the new documentary film movement that developed in Portugal after the revolution, the movie encouraged the local retrieval of the Caretos tradition. A ritual that seemed to be doomed by the conjoined impact of emigration, the colonial war and the crisis of agriculture was thus brought back to life. - Paulo Raposo
Trás-os-Montes
Director of Photography
Reis and Cordeiro’s undisputable masterpiece exploded the meaning and possibilities of ethnographic cinema with its lyrical exploration of the still resonant myths and legends embodied in the people and landscapes of Portugal’s remote Trás-os-Montes region.
Deus Pátria Autoridade
Cinematography
The history of Portugal since the Republican revolution of 1910 to the revolutionary period following the military coup of April 24, 1974, recounted with a marxist perspective, using historic sound and film documents. The title refers to a trilogy of values proclaimed by Salazar, prime minister of Portugal in 1936.
Brandos Costumes
Director of Photography
A portrait of the everyday life of a typical middle-class family in parallel with the fall of the "Estado Novo", the 48-year dictatorship led by Salazar. The daughters' conflicts and frustrations with their parents, their grandmother and their maid find an obvious echo in the country's collective events. The Carnation Revolution is about to explode.
As Armas e o Povo
Director
Film directors with hand-held cameras went to the streets of Lisbon from April 25 to May 1, 1974, registering interviews and political events of the Portuguese "Carnations Revolution", as that period would be later known.
What Shall I Do With This Sword?
Director of Photography
By cross-editing footage of Portuguese workers protesting against NATO forces and various movies, Monteiro shows how one 'sword' can confront the army.
Falamos de Rio de Onor
Director of Photography
A borderland village of Trás-os-Montes, 27 km away from Bragança, Rio de Onor preserved - due to its isolated location - the old communitarian practices, of farmers and shepherds, that define it as an important and unmistakable center of this region.
Jaime
Director of Photography
Jaime, a poem of suffering and loneliness, describes the existence and pictorial work of a man isolated in a psychiatric hospital.
Meus Amigos
Director of Photography
Filmed just before the Carnation Revolution of 1974. Dark portrait of a group of friends who used to be colleagues at the University in 1962. Ten years later, they have lost all their ideals. With Lisbon on the background they discuss politics, love, culture; each of them has reached a deadlock. The camera remains still while it registers the dissolution of their dreams.
Superbug, Super Agent
Director of Photography
Jimmy Bondi and his miracle beetle Dudu are on their way to Portugal by sea. In the Algarve, they are witness to a dispute in which ex-inmate Plato and the attractive Tamara have to do with Marchese de la Sotta and his henchmen.
Past and Present
Director of Photography
This is an intriguing avant-garde look at what motivates the leisurely classes in Portugal, for better or worse, by director Manoel de Oliveira. Set in a spacious country home peopled with a wide-ranging cast of characters, the drama begins as the friends of a widow come to console her on the loss of her husband. But at one point, the widow goes upstairs, encounters her husband, and is faced with his accusations about the past. This event and others provide the means of revealing the petty, self-serving, egocentric, and romantic pursuits of the melange of people in the house. - Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
A Pousada das Chagas
Director of Photography
A representation of fiction and documentary about the museum of Óbidos, Portugal.
Fragments of an Alms-Film
Director of Photography
Maria works in a German umbrella factory as the foreman of the production sector. João Lucas has given up on living a normal life and practically lives in bed, in the midst of green plants. His father expressly desired that his son film this eccentric daily life in 8 mm format. Maria’s wages are dilapidated to the last penny by this amateur, monstrous, family movie production.
Sever do Vouga... Uma Experiência
Cinematography
Short film on the creation of an agricultural cooperative in the village of Sever do Vouga.
He Who Waits for Dead Man Shoes Dies Barefoot
Director of Photography
The tribulations of two friends who, in despair, start begging from door-to-door, and are given a bundle including, literally, a pair of deadman's shoes
The Circle
Director of Photography
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.
The Iron Cross
Assistant Camera
Two neighboring villages fight over control of a stream to water their lands.
Seven Bullets for Selma
Director of Photography
World peace is at stake if a spy-ring obtains the electronic device
Alta Velocidade
Director of Photography
An overview of the assemblage and production of motor vehicles in Portugal, including the local representatives of Mercedes, Morris, and Massey-Ferguson, and subsidiary industries for car parts. - IMDb
Sunday Afternoon
Assistant Camera
Reflections on life and death through the eyes of a Medical Doctor, researcher on blood diseases, under the anguish of consulting a terminally ill young woman.
Enchanted Isles
Camera Operator
A French sailor circa 1850, disembarks in a desert Atlantic island, and discovers a woman who had survived for many years her father and brother, dead while searching for mysterious valuables. The young couple discover paradise, and its end.