Guided tour of the exhibition MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA AND PORTUGUESE CINEMA: 3. TURNS OF LIFE—YESTERDAY AS TODAY, by João Mário Grilo, filmmaker and co-curator of the exhibition.

This is the third and final part of a series of three exhibitions that began in 2023, aimed at placing Manoel de Oliveira’s personal archive—entirely housed at Serralves—in dialogue with a cartography of contemporary Portuguese cinema. Rounding out the trilogy, this exhibition examines the twenty-five years spanning 1990 to 2015, the year of his death, while also completing the chronology of Portuguese cinema that serves as the backdrop for this retrospective. In this final phase of his long career, after he had already passed the age of eighty, Manoel de Oliveira completed thirty-one films (twenty of them feature-length fiction films), a number considerably higher than what he had produced in the preceding six decades (fourteen). Between his mature period—marked by the refinement of his authorial vocabulary—and his late phase—characterized by an increasing simplicity—these last two decades represent the moment when Oliveira combines the classical serenity he had finally achieved with the synthesis, variation, and radicalization of many of the aesthetic and thematic configurations of his earlier work.

In this visit, the filmmaker and co-curator João Mário Grilo will guide us through the various formal and conceptual issues that defined the structure of this phase, which brings this cycle of three exhibitions to a close.