Portuguese Short Story
One thing is obvious about Portuguese cinema: far from being a real industry, it is still a craft industry. Little known, it seems to be reserved for a circle of initiates. At the same time, Portuguese films such as The Letter of Manoel de Oliveira (winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1999) and The Marriage of God by iconoclast João César Monteiro have enjoyed great success at international festivals. In 2013, however, Portugal was propelled to the forefront of the French cinema scene thanks to the huge surprise success of Ruben Alves' film The Golden Cage. The film exceeded one million admissions and enjoyed the same success in Portugal when it was released in the following months. Apart from this phenomenon film, Portuguese cinema currently revolves around a few names and Manoel de Oliveira, THE great Portuguese master of cinema, who died in April 2015, remains known for his stripped-down, meditative style, which can be seen in The Satin Shoe (1985) or The Convent (1995) with Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovitch. Beyond Oliveira, there are other talents, other looks, which form a rather rich and concentrated cinema in the capital. Pedro Costa (2002 France-Culture Filmmaker of the Year Award) films the humanity of misery. In La Chambre de Vanda (2001), he describes the poor and little-known microcosm of the Lisbon neighbourhood of Fontaínhas. In 2006, the director returned with En avant jeunesse! To see these works in the Algarve, there is usually a cinema in every medium-sized town. And, if the circuit is generally dominated by the American "majors" (always with subtitles), a few rare downtown theatres defend auteur cinema and have to cope with the opening of new theatres every time a shopping mall opens.
In Algarve
Although there are several important Portuguese cinematographic works, it is difficult to talk about Algarve cinema as such. Recently, however, there have been three successful films that put this beautiful region of southern Portugal at the heart of their plot: Kristjan Knigge's The Right Juice (2015), starring Portuguese actress Lúcia Moniz (seen in Richard Curtis' Love Actually ); Eric Styles' That Good Night (2017), starring John Hurt; and Leviano (2018), a Luso-Canadian drama directed by Justin Amorim and previewed at Cannes in 2017. The Algarve also has a private association, the Algarve Film Comission, which aims to promote the region as a potential location for international productions. This not-for-profit association is thus trying to develop the audiovisual economy in its region.
