Page 55 - Metropolis Megazine nº118

the nine films in his filmography are bio- It was in this context that the idea for tics was reflected in the way these songs
graphies. “Portugueses” came about. “It had been were thought and were,” he confesses.
on my mind for a long time,” he says,
The director had long wanted to do so- explaining that he knew he wanted to It was there that he found a formula—“s-
mething different, especially in terms of make a film about us—the Portugue- trange, different,” as he describes it— to
form, theme, and politics. Vicente Alves se—with all that that implies: the good, talk about various realities and different
do Ó criticises what he considers a cer- the bad, and, above all, the grey. The layers of Portuguese society. Only then
tain ideological comfort in Portuguese proximity of the 50th anniversary of did he feel he could boldly call the film
cinema, which often avoids addressing April 25th [also known as Freedom Day, “Portugueses”. “Some people thought it
the darker episodes in the country's his- is a national holiday in Portugal com- was excessive to portray the entire Por-
tory or touching on its structural flaws memorating the Carnation Revolution, tuguese spectrum—from the wealthy to
as a society. In his opinion, it is essen- which overthrew the dictatorship and the destitute, from the marginalised to
tial that cinema and the arts in general established democracy in 1974] ended the corporatist apparatus that still exis-
be more interventionist. “We have to be up reinforcing this desire. “There had al- ts. But that was exactly what I wanted”,
closer to people; we have to talk more ready been a lot of talk about April 25th, he shares.
about what needs to be said so that they but not about something that interests
understand that they can often be mani- me a lot: the songs of the great singers, the audacity to question
pulated,” he says. how they understood politics, how poli- The initial audacity of making a film like