Jugar con la memoria : el cine Portugués en el S.XXI

Presentation of the book Jugar con la Memoria: El Cine Portugués en el S.XXI by Iván Villarmea Alvarez.

Portugal has ceased to be the magnet which attracted foreign film-makers fascinated by its history and culture. Instead, from the year 2000 onwards, it has become one of the most important focal points for film-lovers on the international stage.

The eight Portuguese film-makers who are the focus of this book, Jugar con la Memoria: El Cine Portugués en el S.XXI (Shangrila Ed, 2014), edited by Iván Villarmea Álvarez and Horacio Muñoz Fernández, consider different aspects of Portuguese history from the perspective of memory, whether individual or collective, whether the memory is that of the characters they portray or, more directly, the memories evoked by the images shown of times past.

For all of them, memory is a prism through which the past and identity can be viewed critically, whether the memories they bring are of dark times, such as in the cinema of João Canijo and Susana de Sousa Dias, or whether the memories give rise to venomous jokes, such as in the films by João Nicolau and Miguel Gomes.

Most of the time, however, the use of memories is also a reaffirmation of the individual, whether this is a character, such as in the Pedro Costa’s Letters from Fontainhas trilogy, or even the film-makers themselves, such as is the case with João Rui Guerra da Mata in The Last Time I Saw Macao and Gonçalo Tocha in It's the Earth Not the Moon.

The presentation in Sukaldea (Duque de Mandas 32) will involve a session of approximately 50 minutes long during which Iván Villarmea Álvarez will present the book and will include an overview of the various authors who appear with the projection of excerpts of their films. At the end, there will be a round of questions and copies will be available to buy for €18.

After the presentation of the book, we will move to Cines Trueba where we will show the film Centro histórico by Pedro Costa, Manoel de Oliveira, Víctor Erice and Aki Kaurismäki as part of the Los Jueves del Trueba programme. (Entry: €5.50)

Centro histórico, Pedro Costa, Manoel de Oliveira, Víctor Erice, Aki Kaurismäki, 2012. Portugal. VOSE. 90 min.

Actors: Ilkka Koivula, Ventura, António Santos, Manuel ‘Tito’ Furtado, Valdemar Santos, Amândio Martins, Henriqueta Oliveira, Ricardo Trêpa.

Production: Rodrigo Areias, Aki Kaurismäki, Silvério Canto Moniz, Víctor Erice, Abel Ribeiro Chaves

Photography: Timo Salminen, Pedro Costa, Leonardo Simões, Valentín Álvarez, Fransisco Lagrifa Oliveira

Synopsis: Walking through Guimarães (Portugal's founding city), we ask ourselves: What stories does it have to tell us?

We find the answer to this question in the different voices of the four contributors with unique cinematic visions who together create this film. The multiple dimensions of the story come from fiction and reality. And things are not as they seem at first sight.