Second screening of the “Oliveira, Reader of Camilo” film and talks series, conceived and moderated by Tânia Furtado Moreira. In celebration of the bicentennial of Camilo Castelo Branco’s birth, the screening will feature Manoel de Oliveira's “Francisca” (1981).


FRANCISCA
Manoel de Oliveira | POR | 1981 | 167’

Based on the book Fanny Owen by Agustina Bessa-Luís—which in turn was inspired by a true story from the last century—*Francisca* weaves together a reflection by its two main characters, José Augusto and Camilo Castelo Branco, on life and women, love, fatalism, and misfortune. As this dialogue between the two unfolds throughout the film, the characters find themselves caught up in life as victims of their own beliefs. This story, at once carnal and phantasmal, continues the aesthetic path that Oliveira had been developing since O Passado e o Presente, as he himself states: “They say that in dreams there are neither words nor color… that is how silent cinema was—like a dream, phantasmagorical. (…) Cinema was still, as they used to say, the art of silence. Then it gained words and color. These two things—especially color—brought it a realism that dreams lack. This is despite the fact that cinema is not real, in the material sense, as theater is: theater is matter, tangible; the actors and sets are there. Cinema is immaterial: what we see is the phantom of a reality.” (Manoel de Oliveira, in an interview with João Lopes, 1997).