Acting
Documentary adaptation of the book "Labirinto da Saudade," a deconstruction of the Portuguese ethos from a philosophical and historical point of view, written by Eduardo Lourenço.
Seventeen experts on history and arts deliver brief lessons on their favorite subjects, considered the most relevant to cover nine hundred years of Portuguese culture. The camera shows from a distance, or in minute detail, the monuments or art pieces considered, or even the texts discussed by the narrators, reenacted on stage or recited by actors.
"Essay on the Military and the Power", a phrase that also belongs to the title of "Gestures & Fragments", sums up the spirit of the film, based on three points of view on the same theme: Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and Eduardo Lourenço, in their own roles, and the one played by Robert Kramer, as an American journalist bent on seeking explanations for the process of the Portuguese Revolution.
A kino-investigation about spectatorship, a continuous conversation between different kinds of spectators: which one is more cinema: Citizen Kane on a mobile phone or a football game projected in a cinema theatre? What is the cinema of uncertainty? How many kinds of amazement exist? Does fear and belief precede amazement? What are the rights and duties of the spectator? Is the essay film a manifesto against voyeurism? Should spectators be paid? What amazes the spectator of this day and age?
Part of a series in which foreign filmmakers portray a region or town in France. Manoel de Oliveira looks at Nice.
Documentary about the life, convictions and career of Portugal's first and only female Prime Minister. Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo believed that "women can be a force for radical transformation of the institutionalised irrationality in which we live. The multifunctionality of their existence, the diversity of the planes on which they move, their daily lives give them a special capacity to find a new understanding and a new effectiveness for governance in the midst of complexity". Unlike many other women who have the same conviction, Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo turned her life into a praxis of her own belief.
