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 story about doomed love between two people from different worlds and the impact in their lives. Based on the novel of the same name by Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco.

A young girl, Benilde, so protected by her religious family that she seemingly knows nothing about procreation, insists that her mysterious pregnancy is a miracle; however, her distressed bourgeois family decides that Benilde has lost her mind.

Manoel de Oliveira shows us what the evolution of energy represents, through a retrospective of the last century, exploring the three technics that EDP uses in order to produce electricity: hydric, wind, and solar.

Episodes from throughout the entire military history of Portugal are told through flashbacks as a conscripted student of history recounts them to his fellow soldiers while they march through an African colony in revolt during 1973.

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.

Lisbon, a normal day in one of the typical narrow streets of the capital of Portugal. In a small house, in a dirty little street, in a dark corner of the city lives a poor blind beggar, which earns his living through the selling of useless trinkets. The only curious situation is that the blind man keeps all his savings in a little black box donated to him by the government. It is through this box that the poor man proves his visual handicap. And it is this same BOX (a CAIXA) that is envied by all the blind man´s lazy neighbours who are jealous of the little money that is given to the poor man. The life on this (intentionally) excessive dramatic small world is suddenly turned upside down when someone steals the BOX of the blind man unleashing a chain of events that will have a surprising end.

A true story of a doctor and his wife who went on a journey in order to prove that discoverer Christopher Columbus was in fact Portuguese.

The comfortable daily routines of aging Parisian actor Gilbert Valence, 76, are suddenly shaken when he learns that his wife, daughter, and son-in-law have been killed in a car crash. Having to take care of his now-orphaned grandson, he struggles to go on with his lifelong acting career like he's used to. But the roles he is offered -- a flashy TV show and a hectic last-minute replacement in an English-language film of Joyce's Ulysses -- finally convince him that it's time to retire.

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.

Not satisfied with just taking excursions through Europe's ancient landmarks (A Talking Picture, 28th HKIFF), this time the prolific, 96-years-old Portuguese director plunges us into a medieval Hamletian intrigue among Lisbon's most famous monasteries. A young monarch is obsessed with leaving his legacy by creating a mythical, utopian Fifth Empire, while his people are suffering from poverty. Is he insane? Or is he guided by the Holy Cobbler? Based upon the real-life mysteries behind King Sebastião, who perished in 1578 during a crusade in Morocco, this controversial parable redresses the Crusades as an inevitable clash between the West and Islam.
每年不來向迪奧里菲拉朝朝聖，就不是過電影節似的。幸好這個電影老將勇猛如故。前作《大浪淘沙》（28屆）娓娓談今日的恐怖主義襲地球，此作反其道而行，以古諷今重構十六世紀歷史神話裏好戰君王的心路歷程。神話在葡萄牙家傳戶曉：塞巴斯蒂安大帝為了圓其雄圖大國夢，不顧國民水深火熱，也不理朝中大臣的勸阻、弄臣的嘲笑，喪心病狂遠征回教徒。迪奧利菲拉招來大帝的心魔-擁有催眠異能的神秘角色，長期失眠的大帝終於睡了一覺，之後的一切，應驗了夢中預言。奇怪是回教神話裏，也存在同一人物，他騎?白馬來驅走惡魔，維護世界和平！
Source: 29th HKIFF 2005

During the century of the Spanish Gold, Doña Prouhèze, wife of a nobleman, deeply loves Don Rodrigo, who is forced to leave Spain and go to America. Meanwhile Prouhèze is sent to Africa to rule the city of Mogador. Ten years later Rodrigo leaves America and travels to Africa in search of Prouhèze to find out that she died and eventually meeting her daughter.

1998 Portuguese drama film directed by Manoel de Oliveira

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.

José and Roberto are friends, and they decide to go hunting but without guns, so that no accident will happen. As they stroll and talk, one of them falls into a hole in a hidden marshland. His friend runs away, and manages to gather a number of men that were in the vicinity. They form a human chain to pull the victim out, but their affliction mounts, as they have no strategy for doing it, and they can't understand each other.