The rich, rigorous work of Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira is at once passionate and austere, gracefully weaving philosophy, literature, theater, and storytelling into a purely cinematic experience. We celebrate the upcoming centennial of this still active director with a major series.
Read full descriptionThe gorgeous northern Portuguese coast provides the setting for Oliveira's reimagining of Flaubert's Madame Bovary. “As engrossing as a rich 19th-century novel.”-Variety
Michel Piccoli returns in Oliveira's intriguing “sequel” to Buñuel's Belle de Jour, with Bulle Ogier essaying the Deneuve role. A tribute to Buñuel, eroticism, and unsolved enigmas.
Catherine Deneuve is a frigid housewife who indulges her masochistic desires by working in a Paris brothel. A subversive erotic classic from Luis Buñuel.
Oliveira offers an appreciation of the birth of Western civilization to contemplate its demise in this “sharply cut gem of a film” (N.Y. Times) with Catherine Deneuve, Stefania Sandrelli, and Irene Papas.
Oliveira's most recent film finds an amateur historian attempting to prove Columbus's Portuguese roots. A fascinating essay on history, nationalism, and the quest for discovery.
An actor (Michel Piccoli) adjusts to the tragic death of his wife and son in this leisurely paean to everyday beauty. Costarring Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich.
Mental asylum inmates take on the personas of Jesus, Raskolnikov, and Adam and Eve in this imaginative combination of cinema, philosophy, and literature. With Maria de Medeiros.
Three stories are combined into one in Oliveira's fascinating examination of death and immortality, filmed in Portugal and Madrid. “A masterpiece with irreverent wit, ironic bite, and anger.”-Jonathan Rosenbaum
Portuguese soldiers in 1973 Angola discuss the history of combat in Oliveira's theoretical treatise on war, destiny, and colonialism. An Apocalypse Now of philosophical ideals.
Dramatization of the last days of Portugal's famous 19th-century novelist Camilo Castelo Branco. “Cool, stylized, and elegant.”-London Film Festival
A lovely maiden falls in love with an upper-class gentleman-but discovers his body is entirely mechanical-in Oliveira's surreal musical collaboration with the Lisbon Opera House. “Perhaps the only genuine opera film to date.”-Toronto Film Festival
Two men become infatuated with an Englishwoman in Oliveira's masterpiece of frustrated love. “As if Straub had collaborated with Ophuls.”-Dave Kehr
This program of earlier poetic works by the great director includes his first film, Douro, Working River, a 1931 silent classic. Also The Painter and the City; Bread.
Young lovers are separated by family feuds and aristocratic mores in Oliveira's update of a classic 1861 novel. “A minuet staged as grand opera.”-Village Voice
An intruder interrupts a play with his own monologue in Oliveira's Pirandellian assault on the fourth wall. “Nothing other than a great, stylistically opened metaphor for man's entrance upon the world's stage.”-Berlin Film Festival
Oliveira's deliciously Buñuelian satire of the backstabbing rich chronicles a disastrous mansion party. “A caustic comedy.”-NFT, London
A young girl's pregnancy may be truly “divine” in Oliveira's Dreyer-by-way-of-Sirk dissection of Portuguese propriety and religious hypocrisies.
A rural Portuguese town's passion play forms the center of Oliveira's prescient mix of documentary, fiction, and re-enactments that “takes on a strange, ancient, hieratic force.”-Sight & Sound
Oliveira's 1945 debut feature prefigured neorealism with a child's-eye view of Porto, the director's hometown. With short The Hunt.
A film director (Marcello Mastroianni in his last role) tours the Portuguese countryside in this “exquisitely sad and moving reflection on memory and personal roots.”-N.Y. Times