Movies: João Bénard da Costa

Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, "To Each His Own Cinema" brought together 33 of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers to produce short pieces exploring the multifarious facets of cinema and their perspective on the...

Episodes from entire military history of Portugal are told through flashbacks as a professorish soldier recounts them while marching through a Portuguese African colony in 1973....

A story about doomed love between two people from different worlds and the impact in their lives....

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

Luciano, fresh out of jail, was taken by his brother, Flórido, to serve in the home of wealthy Alfreda. He was surprised when she told him that her greatest desire was to see the Virgin Mary. Now comes this rich land owner with her sublime pretension...

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....

The journey of Michael Padovic, an American professor who arrives with his wife, Helene, at a Portuguese convent where he expects to find the documents needed to prove his theory: Shakespeare was born in Spain; not in England....

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....

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. ...

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...

The story of Father Antonio Vieira, a 17th-century Portuguese priest who lived in Brazil and worked for better treatment of the Indians and to abolish slavery....

A blind beggar is robbed of his chest of money. The theft leads to a dramatic situation in the street where he begs every day....

A man exiled in Paris makes various trips to Portugal after the Carnation Revolution. Each trip is represented by a woman....

This visually striking drama is taken from the classic Japanese novel Tales Of Genji by Marasaki Shikibu. Set in modern Portugal, Joao (Luis Miguel Cintra) is a left-wing political leader and ladies man with a bright future. His ex-wife Isabel (Manue...

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 fr...

Manoel de Oliveira's autobiographical documentary about returning to his hometown....

The city during the beginning of cinema. The typical city at the time of the dictatorship. The New Lisbon of the New Cinema. Lisbon after the Revolution. The white city of foreigners. A geographical and moviegoer screenplay of Lisbon through the imag...

Having lost her place among the social elite, a widow remarries and starts a family....

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 bec...

The Midnight Sun Film Festival is held every June in the Finnish village of Sodankylä beyond the arctic circle — where the sun never sets. Founded by Aki and Mika Kaurismäki along with Anssi Mänttäri and Peter von Bagh in 1985, the festival has playe...