This new 4K digital restoration by the Cinemateca Portuguesa premiered at the 76th Venice Film Festival in 2019. A sinister, absorbing portrait of a mutually destructive 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. 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
- “A cross between a lush Visconti period piece and the stylized expressionism of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. A titanic figure, the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (1908-2015) got his start in the era of silent cinema and completed his last feature at the age of 105.” ~ J. Hoberman, The New York Times
- “A masterpiece of modern cinema. A story of great subtlety, density, and emotional impact. It is as if Jean-Marie Straub has collaborated with Max Ophuls.” ~ Dave Kehr, When Movies Mattered.