A Portuguese Farewell

Joao Botelho’s 1985 feature, shot by Raul Ruiz’s cinematographer Acacio de Almeida, intercuts two stories dealing in separate ways with Portugal’s colonialist past in Angola and Mozambique. In the first, set in 1973, a patrol of Portuguese soldiers looking for rebels becomes lost in an African jungle; in the second, set in 1985, an elderly couple leave their farm in the Minho region to visit the widow of their eldest sonkilled in Africa in 1973and their younger son in Lisbon. Reportedly influenced by both Ozu and Manoel de Oliveira, this film won first prize at the 1986 Rio International Film Festival.

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