A Glória de Fazer Cinema em Portugal

A Glória de Fazer Cinema em Portugal ( Portuguese for: The Honor of Making Cinema in Portugal) is a 2015 short documentary film by Portuguese director Manuel Mozos.

The title of the film is a quote from the letter of Portuguese writer and poet José Régios, which is quoted several times in the film.

Plot

The film focuses on a letter from José Régio to his friend Alberto Serpa dated September 18, 1929, in which Régio informs Sepra of his intention to set up a film production company called Ultra with friends in order to make quality films in Portugal. He asks Serpa to start by lending him a film camera from an acquaintance in Porto that he had previously told Régio about. There appears to have never been a reply to the letter.

But then a resident of Régio's hometown of Vila do Conde found, among his countless collections about the city in the 2000s, film canisters containing a few minutes of film that turned out to have an amazing story. Using original recordings, this short documentary shows the viewer how that recording actually came about in Vila do Conde.

The director himself, as a voice-over, guides the viewer through the film. He tells the viewer of a cameraman named Remi Caillaud who arrived in Vila do Conde on August 30, 1930. Caillaud was born to French parents on May 4, 1887, in Meiringen, Switzerland and later went with his parents to Paris. After the First World War, he became a cameraman and filmed air shows, particularly in Italy. In 1928 he came to Portugal to film an air show there and continued to work there.

The director narrates how Régio and Caillaud first met on December 1, 1930, on the terrace of the Hotel Palace in Vila do Conde, with their mutual friend Alberto Serpa. Records indicate that those involved spent several weeks together in Vila do Conde, during which they also screened the film Fátima Milagrosa by Rino Lupo at the local Teatro Afonso Sanches. It can therefore be assumed that the 4 minutes of film that were now found were made at this time.

After that, there was no progress on the project. The viewer is informed that Régio's notes only indicate that he did not like the Frenchman's ideas, without specifying whether they were artistic, technical or socio-political ideas. No recordings of Caillaud are known after 1930; he only reappears as a projectionist in Paris. The documentary mentions local newspaper O Democrático from Vila do Conde reporting on September 26, 1930, an incident in which a Frenchman, after losing some cash, his watch, Swiss jewelry and his film equipment while playing cards, vandalized the gaming hall in anger and was taken into police custody, and was only released after paying a fine.

The viewer is told that after that, Régio never showed interest in filming again. Records and a photo shown at the end of the documentary show how Régio was introduced to director Manoel de Oliveira after a screening of the film Hard Work on the Douro River ( Douro, Faina Fluvial ) at the Cinema Olímpia in Porto in December 1931. The narrator in the documentary suggests that after the film, Régio no longer saw the need to produce an artistically demanding Portuguese film himself.

The film shows a variety of evidence, from newspaper articles and cinema posters to letters and other documents to the found original recordings from 1930. The end credits then point out that there are a number of facts in the film be mentioned, but the story told is overall the fiction of a cinema film.

Production and reception

The film was produced in 2010 by the film production company Curtas Mesagens CRL, with support from an EU regional fund and from the municipality of Vila do Conde.

The film premiered on July 6, 2015, at the 23rd Curtas Vila do Conde Short Film Festival, where it received a film award. It then screened at other film festivals, including the Doclisboa (2015), the Locarno Film Festival (2015, out of competition), the Festival de Cinema Luso-Brasileiro of Santa Maria da Feira (award for best short film), the Festival du Court- Métrage de Clermont-Ferrand (2016) and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2016).

It was released on DVD in 2018 by Alambique in Portugal, as bonus material for the feature film Ramiro.