Second session of the SER Project film cycle: Mental Health, Stigma and Resilience. The project is developed by professionals from the fields of health, culture, education and social communication, and proposes a space for reflection on mental illness and the stigmas that surround it, promoting dialogue between science, health and society. The session will feature a screening of Manoel de Oliveira's ‘A Divina Comédia’ (1991), with commentary at the end by António Roma Torres.

5 NOV | THU | 17:00

A DIVINA COMÉDIA | THE DIVINE COMEDY

Manoel de Oliveira | POR, FRA, SUI | 140'

The Divine Comedy brings together an extravagant gallery of characters in a ‘house of the insane’: Adam and Eve, Christ and the Pharisee, Saint Teresa, Sonia and Raskolnikov, the Karamazov brothers, Lazarus and his sisters, the pianist Maria João Pires, a philosopher with the air of Nietzsche and a Prophet, author of a ‘Fifth Gospel’ which is nothing more than a blank book. Taken from the Bible, the ‘Antichrist’, two novels by Dostoyevsky and the play ‘A Salvação do Mundo’ (The Salvation of the World) by José Régio, this group of notable patients transforms their forced confinement into a heated dispute of views on the world, life and reality. While not all of them have eaten the apple of original sin, they all have something to say in this comedy of humanity, which is also a tragic parable about Western civilisation and a highly original collage of literary texts.