- This event has passed.
Francisca [New Restoration!]
December 4, 2020 - December 6, 2020
Virtual screening, free for Everyone!
Register here!
Screening link active 12/4-12/6
New Restoration!
A portrait of an obsessive love affair, Manoel de Oliveira’s Francisca is based on a novel by Agustina Bessa-Luís, whose work he’d later adapt twice more. The book’s re-telling of a troubled passage in real-life author Camilo Castelo Branco life — his friend José Augusto embarked on a perverse game of marital cat and mouse with Francisca, the woman the novelist loved — led Oliveira to new levels of stylistic and formal imagination. (It helped that his wife, a distant relative of the historical Francisca, gave him access to a cache of the woman’s letters.) With its elaborate title cards, its abundance of shots in which the action is oriented directly toward the camera, its gloomy interiors, and its show-stopping gala set-pieces, Francisca is an exacting, sumptuous and utterly inimitable cinematic experience, and one of Oliveira’s crowning achievements.
(Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, Portuguese w/ Eng. Sub, 166 min, 1981)