Our Man (O Nosso Homem). 2010. Portugal. Directed by Pedro Costa. Screenplay by Costa, José Alberto Silva, Lucinda Tavares, Alfredo Mendes, Ventura, António Semedo. DCP. In Portuguese; English subtitles. 24 min.
The Green Years (Os Verdes Anos). 1963. Portugal. Directed by Paulo Rocha. Screenplay by Rocha, Nuno Bragança. With Isabel Ruth, Rui Gomes, Ruy Furtado, Paulo Renato. 4K digital restoration by Cinemateca Portuguesa; courtesy Cinemateca Portuguesa. In Portuguese; English subtitles. 88 min.
A defining work of the Cinema Novo movement, Paulo Rocha’s debut feature was a revolutionary moment in an industry controlled by the outdated morality of António de Oliveira Salazar’s censors. Rocha, a former assistant to Jean Renoir and Manoel de Oliveira, uses the young love between a shoe shiner and a maid working for Lisbon’s bourgeoisie, to dramatize how Portugal’s isolation and class exploitation created insurmountable obstacles to living an honest life. Shot in Lisbon’s new neighborhoods of the 1950s—steps away from the city’s slums, where Pedro Costa would build a cinematic universe—The Green Years established a new, modern cinematic language with the help of Carlos Paredes’s vertiginous guitar playing. In Our Man, Pedro Costa and Ventura revisit ghosts and tales from Portuguese colonialism through the person of José Alberto Silva, a man in the Fontainhas neighborhood who is soon to be deported to Cape Verde, a country he’s never seen before.