Susana de Sousa Dias continues her exploration of Portugal’s tragic past in this moving experimental essay film on political imprisonment, government oppression, and the families left behind in their wake. Like her earlier Still Life and 48, the film brings to light official images from the Portuguese secret police archives of political prisoners under the dictatorship; here, testimonies of the pictured detainees’ surviving children, now adults, are heard over the photographs. A literal speaking of truth to power, Luz obscura amplifies the voice of the people against the imagery of the state, to hypnotic, and devastating, effect.