PORTUGAL’S GLOBAL CINEMA • INDUSTRY, HISTORY AND CULTURE • MARIANA LIZ (ED.)

PORTUGAL’S GLOBAL CINEMA • INDUSTRY, HISTORY AND CULTURE • Edited by Mariana Liz • 2018 I.B. Tauris 284 pgs • Textos de Cristina Álvarez López; Nuno Barradas Jorge; Anthony de Melo; Michael Godard; Rui Gonçalves Miranda; Randal Johnson; Mariana Liz; Adrian Martin; Paul Melo e Castro; Carolin Overhoff Ferreira; Lúcia Nagib; Hilary Owen; Natália Pinazza; Luís Trindade & Ginette Vincendeau • Tauris World Cinema Series edited by Lúcia Nagib & Julian Ross • Cover image: Sónia Bandeira in Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto, directed by Miguel Gomes • Livro disponível na Linha de Sombra • www.linhadesombra.com ▶︎ Cinemateca Portuguesa-Museu do Cinema ■

”Family is at once the most cherished and the most fragile structure in the cinema of Villaverde. Her debut feature, A IDADE MAIOR (1991), begins with the representation of the traumatic effects of a broken family. In darkened image, young Alex (Ricardo Colares) stands, with his back to the camera, in front of a tree. An off-screen female voice - which begins over the blank screen that is part of the opening credits - asks him: «Alex, do you remember your father?» He answers, his back still turned, «No». The voice returns: «Your mother?» Now Alex quickly swivels around, pauses thoughtfully, revealing the tears rolling down his cheeks, and replies with a strange softness: «No». Cut to the film titles. After this truly inaugural moment - a concentrated fragment scenery a scene, but entirely self sufficient, as so many scenes of Villaverde’s scenes are - all of her films have focused, from one angle of another, on the disintegration of the family."

THE HOLY FAMILY / BROKEN LINKS: THE CINEMA OF TERESA VILLAVERDE, Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin