A small fishing boat is ship-wrecked. Four men are soaked to their bones for long hours, not knowing if someone will come to their rescue. With Lisbon on the horizon, but no one in sight, and their lives in danger, they have no choice but to try to reach the riverside by themselves (despite knowing the chances of success are slim). For 24 hours, amongst sand and sea slime, swimming and dragging themselves through the water, torn between despair and exhaustion. Will help arrive too late? This second feature by José Nascimento, after his first “Reporter X”, is a harrowing (and rare in Portuguese cinema) Survival Film based on an article published by O INDEPENDENTE in 1995, about an absurd shipwreck of a fishing craft boat in the middle of the Tagus river. It’s the first and only Portuguese film that depicts Tagus as a river of death.

A military plane that transports an experimental atomic bomb suffers technical damage and is forced to dump it in the ocean, so it doesn’t fall into the hands of the enemy. However, the radiation generated by the explosion will transform a sea snake into a gigantic creature. The captain of a ship wrecked by the serpent and an American tourist who lost his best friend join forces to destroy the monster, with the help of a renowned oceanographer. The last film of Galician Amando de Ossorio, father of the knight templar zombies (“The Return of the Evil Dead”), who suffered a heart-attack during filming. A variation of “Jaws’’ and “Godzilla”, shot in the Portuguese coastside and in Lisbon, where we can see Timothy Bottoms (“The Last Picture Show”) and, for the last time, the classic Hollywood actor Ray Milland. Considered by specialists one of the “best worst movies” ever.

“In a coast-area community, two clans - a small but influential one, constituted by the owner of the boats; and a larger less-resourceful one of fishermen - whose fishing trawlers go out relentlessly to sea. Over a hateful intrigue, rivalries and passions, hovers a terrible secret”. This was how the film was promoted one hundred years ago. Its goal was to glorify the “Lusitanian soul”, although its director was French. Roger Lion was one of the pioneers of Portuguese Cinema, alongside Maurice Mariaud and Georges Pallu. “Os Olhos da Alma” has scuffles, betrayals, ghosts, uncontrollable windmills and an epic character like the ones from D.W. Griffith and Victor Sjostrom. Virgínia de Castro e Almeida (scriptwriter/producer) one of the heroines of our national cinema, not enough times praised or even mentioned. The screening of “Os Olhos da Alma” had live musical accompaniment with an original soundtrack by Surma.

In “A Invenção do Amor”, by António Campos, a couple is chased down by the police and the city’s inhabitants for the crime of having invented love. Inspired by a homonymous poem by the Cape-Verdean poet Daniel Filipe, Campos’ first fiction, who is more known for his ethnographic work, is an allegory for Estado Novo (the ‘New State’ dictatorship), shot with his friends in Leiria. The film was taken out of circulation by the director himself, who knew it would be censored. Print from Cinemateca Portuguesa digitised by project FILMar/EEAGrants 2020-2024.

In Sinde Filipe’s film, his second short after “O Piano” and before “O Leproso”, love is yet again the centre of the narrative. A young couple, unable to make love after being repelled on several occasions (like in a dubious inn), buys a bed and carries it for miles, until they reach a beach – where, exhausted, they end up falling asleep

Xavier Monteiro is a researcher and university professor who lives with his wife, children and a baby grandson in an apartment in Lisbon. One day, he receives the news of the death of an uncle, owner of a family manor house in a village in the municipality of Seia. Being the only legitimate heir, he becomes the owner of the property and decides to move there with his family. Upon arriving at the village, he realises that the locals are very superstitious and believers in matters relating to the occult. At first, Xavier dismisses this, but strange and unexplained events start to happen, corresponding to some local beliefs. The “first Portuguese horror film” is the result of a collaboration between directors Tiago Guedes and Frederico Serra and screenwriter Rodrigo Guedes de Carvalho.

On a day like any other, Lino Paes Rodrigues arrives at his real estate entrepreneur’s office knowing that nothing
good awaits him. But when he opens a personal letter, he realises that his life may have changed completely after all. A great-uncle, with whom he had been angry for many years, has just died, leaving him an enormous estate in the Alentejo, near Elvas. But this unexpected inheritance takes him back to a place and a time that he had already forgotten, and where after all there are still memories and ghosts that he shouldn’t want to awaken. An intriguing story about a family, a manor house and its macabre past, adapted from a novel with the same title by the Brazilian author Tabajara Ruas, which Fonseca e Costa transposes to the Iberian border

Professor Michael Padovic, together with his wife Hélène, travel from Paris to a convent in Arrábida in search of essential documents to prove that Shakespeare had Spanish and not British ancestry. Its host is the guardian of the convent, a strange character who goes by the name of Baltar. There is something mysterious about Hélène that captivates Baltar. To distract her husband’s attention, he suggests that he hire Piedade, the convent’s new archivist, as his assistant. The situation becomes extremely bizarre and culminates in an unexpected way. Manoel de Oliveira’s second most declared foray into the field of horror after “The Cannibals”, in 1988, is an allegory between Good and Evil around four characters. Nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes 1995.