The Lusophone Long Take: Cinema in Portuguese, From Lisbon to the Sertão

One Language, Two Cinemas

Portuguese is spoken across four continents, and its cinema splits, productively, into two temperaments. Portugal makes films about time: the slow ruin of empire, the weight of saudade, faces held in frame until they crack. Brazil makes films about heat and hunger: the drought-cracked sertão, the favela, the carnival that masks a class war. They rarely look alike. They almost never feel alike. But put them side by side and you get one of world cinema's most quietly important bodies of work.

The Portuguese line runs through Manoel de Oliveira, who kept directing past the age of 100, and the austere modernism of his heirs: Pedro Costa filming the Cape Verdean immigrants of Lisbon's Fontainhas neighborhood, Miguel Gomes braiding fable and politics, the deadpan absurdism of João César Monteiro. The Brazilian line begins in fury with Cinema Novo (Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos) and surges back into global view around 2002 with City of God, then powers a contemporary wave that carried Walter Salles to an Oscar with I'm Still Here.

This guide treats both halves as one family. It also reaches, where the catalog genuinely holds them, into the Brazilian literature and music that the films grew out of, because you cannot read this cinema without bossa nova and without the novelists of the backlands.

Cinema Novo: A Camera in the Hand, an Idea in the Head

That slogan, Glauber Rocha's, is the founding creed of Cinema Novo, the movement that detonated Brazilian film in the early 1960s. Rough, urgent, openly political, it answered Italian neorealism with something hotter: the estética da fome, an aesthetic of hunger, that turned poverty itself into both subject and style. Rocha's Black God, White Devil (1964) and Entranced Earth (1967) are its hallucinatory peaks, mixing mysticism, banditry and Marxist critique in the dry northeastern sertão.

Nelson Pereira dos Santos is the movement's other patriarch. His Vidas Secas (1963), adapted from Graciliano Ramos's novel, is the most rigorous account of drought and dispossession Brazilian cinema produced, and his satire How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971) turned the colonial encounter into black comedy: the colonizer, literally, eaten. After the 1964 military coup tightened censorship, the movement bent toward the playful, allegorical Tropicália mode, exemplified by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Macunaíma (1969).

Lisbon Schools: Oliveira's Long Shadow

Manoel de Oliveira had one of the strangest careers in film history. He shot his first work in the early 1930s and kept making features into his second century, a body of work that stretches from silent documentary to literary chamber pieces like Francisca and The Convent. Theatrical, talky, formally severe, his films taught generations of Portuguese directors to trust stillness and the human voice.

The heir who pushed furthest is Pedro Costa, whose Fontainhas films (Ossos, In Vanda's Room, Colossal Youth) shot the Cape Verdean immigrants of a condemned Lisbon neighborhood with the patience and chiaroscuro of a painter, blurring documentary and fiction until the distinction stops mattering. Miguel Gomes took the opposite tack toward play: Tabu splits into a Lisbon present and a silent African-colonial romance, and the sprawling Arabian Nights trilogy turns austerity-era Portugal into a chain of folk tales. Around them sit the deadpan eroticism of João César Monteiro and the political memory pieces of João Botelho. This is a small national cinema that has long outweighed its size at Cannes and Locarno.