This is the third and final part of a cycle of three exhibitions that began in 2023, aiming to place the director's personal archive, entirely deposited at Serralves, in dialogue with a cartography of contemporary Portuguese cinema. Organised chronologically, the first of these exhibitions, entitled For the Good of the Nation (1930-1970), focused on the Estado Novo regime and, having presented the filmmaker's archive in its entirety, constituted a first attempt to unarchive the extensive documentary collection he had assembled over more than eighty years of work. The second stage, Freedom! (1970-1990), focused on the period immediately before and after the Carnation Revolution, investigating from the perspective of anachronism, the way in which Oliveira placed himself “outside of time” in order to construct, in contrast to the rest of the film production of the time, a singular vision of the country, its history, and its political reality. Concluding the trilogy, this exhibition examines the twenty-five years between 1990 and 2015, the year of his death, also completing the chronology of Portuguese cinema that forms the backdrop to this survey.

In this final phase of his long career, after turning eighty, Oliveira completed thirty-one films (twenty of them feature-length fiction films), considerably more than he had made in the previous six decades (fourteen). Between his maturity, marked by the refinement of his authorial vocabulary, and his later phase, characterised by a growing simplicity, these last two decades represent the moment when Oliveira combined the classical serenity he finally achieved with the synthesis, variation, and radicalisation of many of the aesthetic and thematic configurations of his earlier work.

Whether through deeper speculation about the country, history, and the destinies of Europe and civilisation, through a strict economy of formal means, or through a heightened critical awareness of his own trajectory and a highly personal (even autobiographical) reflection on the passage of time, this is a period of fulfilment, closely linked to the consolidation of production conditions and the definitive international recognition of the work and of its author. This is also a phase that coincides with a strong internationalization of Portuguese cinema and the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers who, continuing to fight (often against all odds) for the affirmation of auteur cinema, found indispensable support in the exemplary figure of Manoel de Oliveira.

The exhibition is organised by the Serralves Foundation — Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira, curated by António Preto and João Mário Grilo, and coordinated by Carla Almeida.

The research work was developed in collaboration with the CineLab – Ifilnova (NOVA University Lisbon’s Philosophy Institute) and the Portuguese Cinema timeline (1991-2015) had the contribution of Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema.