Movies: Mário Barroso

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 retrospective on the life and work of Portuguese director António-Pedro Vasconcelos....

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

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

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 ...

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

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....

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 ma...

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....

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....

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....

"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....

In a unique approach to what amounts to four pseudo-morality plays, director Monique Rutler has a street entertainer with hand puppets summarize the characters and idea of each story. The first sketch is about a young man who shines shoes for a livin...

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 ...

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

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....

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 romanti...

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 af...

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 scre...

Portugal, 1917. The country is experiencing a great political and social agitation and it is said that in Fatima the virgin appeared to three little shepherds. Salomé, a young lady from the province, is one of the many girls who cheers Lisbon brothe...