Fourth session of the Re-Camões films and talks programme, which proposes a series of cinematographic reinterpretations of Luís de Camões, on the occasion of the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of his birth. The session will feature screenings of the short films Taprobana (2014) by Gabriel Abrantes, Erros Meus (2000) by Jorge Cramez, and O Velho do Restelo (2014) by Manoel de Oliveira, followed by a conversation between Ricardo Nicolau, curator and deputy director of the Serralves Museum, and António Preto, director of the Manoel de Oliveira Cinema House.

TAPROBANA

Gabriel Abrantes | POR, SRI, DEN, FRA | 2014 | 24'

Taprobana, present-day Sri Lanka, at the end of the 16th century. The largest island in the Indian Ocean is a Portuguese colony. An elephant revels in the water. He rises and falls with pleasure, immersed, snorting. A man appreciates a woman. They make love in the open air. When the man reaches his climax, the elephant comes out of the water. The man is Luís Vaz de Camões, the Portuguese poet and later national hero. For now, he's just a man in the service of the Portuguese court. Banished from Lisbon, he lives in exile and works on the only thing that matters to him: The Lusiads. In the form of an epic poem based on Homer's Odyssey, it traces a journey through time, examining the heroic history of the Portuguese discoveries.

ERROS MEUS

Jorge Cramez | POR | 2000 | 15'

Based on a work by Jorge de Sena, ""Erros Meus"" shows Camões in his old age as a sick, syphilitic man, practically incapable of moving, of taking care of himself, of enduring the pain that overwhelms him (his mother takes care of him). He suffers from nostalgia for his youth and his physical weakness. Constantly tormented by creditors, by people who ask him to do jobs he doesn't always like but has to accept for a living, persecuted by his mother's disconcerting loquacity, by his illness, by the memory of past adventures and debaucheries, he endures and keeps quiet. But when he finds himself alone in the silence of the night, a supernatural voice speaks from within him and dictates imperiously.

O VELHO DO RESTELO

Manoel de Oliveira | POR, FRA | 2014 | 19'

Manoel de Oliveira's final film is a free and hopeless dive into history as it is written, like a fertile sediment, in his memory. Oliveira brings together Don Quixote, the poet Luís Vaz de Camões, and the writers Teixeira de Pascoaes and Camilo Castelo Branco on a 21st century bench. Together, carried by the telluric movements of thought, they drift between past and present, defeats and glories, emptiness and alienation, in search of the inaccessible star.