The best José Mário Branco’s movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best José Mário Branco’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about José Mário Branco.
Silvestre
7.4/10
A bewitching combinatory adaptation of the Bluebeard tale and a 15th century Portuguese fable of a damsel who disguises herself as a knight errant.
Agosto
6.5/10
Summer of 1964. The professor Carlos and the couple Dário and Alda spend time together in the beach during vacations. Away from the colonial war, everything seems lost in time.
Aqui D'El Rei!
6.1/10
At the end of the nineteenth century, an army force led by Major Mouzinho de Albuquerque, a cavalry officer, imprisoned in Mozambique the great regulative Governor Gungunhana, who had rebelled against Portuguese government and sovereignty
Poor George
6.5/10
One night Jorge will meet with a Japanese industrialist, who will allow him to abandon his teaching position and resume his chemical work. However, when he gets home he finds a person there.
The Sound of the Shaking Earth
7/10
Freely based on Gide ('Paludes') and Hawthorne ('Wakefield'), this is a film about a writer who never wrote anything and who blows at nightfall the breath of frost. The poem by Carlos Queiroz to which the above sentences belong is not cited in 'O som da Terra a Tremer', but the atmosphere is that, between written letters never received. Fiction within fiction, stories within stories, like those Chinese boxes in which there is always one inside another. Or the two margins of the same river, always being lateral.
River of Gold
6.6/10
Carolina, an aging local grande dame who works at a crossing point on the titular river, marries another late-in-life character, the dredging-boat operator Antonio. Not long after their union, she becomes intensely jealous of Antonio's fondness for their winsome goddaughter, Joana, and insinuates herself into a relationship brewing between Joana and a mystical gypsy gold salesman. Soon, tempers are flaring, mystical secrets are being revealed and death is hovering over the central characters.
Deus Pátria Autoridade
6.9/10
The history of Portugal since the Republican revolution of 1910 to the revolutionary period following the military coup of April 24, 1974, recounted with a marxist perspective, using historic sound and film documents. The title refers to a trilogy of values proclaimed by Salazar, prime minister of Portugal in 1936.
Good Portuguese People
7.5/10
Using film and television footage taken during the revolutionary movement of April 25, 1974 in Portugal, and mixing it with music and live interviews with common people, the director conveys a vivid account of the period in which a military coup evolved to a socialist revolution, then was tempered into a formal European style democracy.
The Sword and the Rose
5.6/10
Manuel bids farewell to his routine and boards a 15th century vessel under pirate law. Treason on board triggers a series of terrible events our protagonist overcomes while keeping his moral principles intact.
Mudar de vida: José Mário Branco, vida e obra
A documentary about the life and work of musician, composer, poet, actor, activist, columnist, and music producer José Mário Branco, a multitalented man who has been using his songs to transform the country and whose lyrics make as much sense today as they did 40 years ago. The shooting began in 2005 and covered seven years of rehearsals, recordings, talks and concerts, both in Portugal and France. In this film, José Mário Branco talks about music, his convictions, his generation, the dictatorship, the colonial war and his imprisonment and exile. It is the portrait of a man for whom “the song [was always] a weapon.”
Fado Camané
6.8/10
Documentary about the Portuguese singer Camané and the process of creating one of fado's key works, revealing a rigorous search that allows him to achieve masterful interpretations.
