The death of the filmmaker Alberto Seixas Santos – the Public.en

Alberto Seixas Santos, one of the names of Cinema Novo Português, died early Saturday morning at his home in Lisbon, I knew the PUBLIC along with a friend of the filmmaker. Was 80 years old and was sick for about a year. His most well known film, Lenient Customs, is the portrayal of the agony of the New State.

your film has been marked by a dialogue much the cerrado and uncompromising with Portugal. In March, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, the Cinemateca Portuguesa, dedicated to him a retrospective. As a teacher in Film School was a figure guardianship for many filmmakers of the new generations.

Cinema of another time according to Alberto Seixas Santos

Mild Customs, 1975, was the first feature film by the director, and is considered to be an emblematic work of the New Cinema, even though it is already late, that renewed the national cinema from the ‘ 60s. His last feature film, The Evil, 1999, was presented at the Venice film Festival.

Born in 1936, Alberto Seixas Santos was regarded by many as the great "theoretical" of a generation of filmmakers from the Cinema Novo, with experience of critical and cineclubismo, but that if aglutinaria to the back of the pioneer experience of the Portuguese Centre of Cinema was created in 1969. This cooperative partially founded by Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, was, in the words of the critic and historian Luís de Pina, in his History of the Portuguese Cinema, responsible for "nearly all the Portuguese production of interest between 1971 and 1975". This generation that Pina was defined as "the generation Gulbenkian foundation" were also names like Alfredo Tropa, Eduardo Geada, Jose Fonseca and Costa, António-Pedro Vasconcelos, and João César Monteiro.

for more than 20 years a professor in the School of Theatre and Film, Seixas Santos rode very little: only five long in his own name, almost at the pace of one per decade. In fact, his title, the most known remains his first feature-length film: Mild Customs, written with Luíza Neto Jorge and Nuno Júdice, the round prior to the 25th of April, but only completed and released after the revolution. This was followed by Gestures and Fragments (1982), Paradise Lost (1992), Evil and Time Passes (2011). In 2005, I finished the short film The Girl of the Dead Hand, which debuted on the 13.º Festival of Short Films of Vila do Conde.

Seixas Santos was also the co-author of the film collective of the revolutionary period of The Guns and the People (1975) and the Law of The Land (1977), the latter produced under the purview of the Group Zero, and participated as an actor in a number of films, including the short Miguel Gomes <> > > > > Inventory of Christmas. His work was also the subject of a documentary by Luís Alves de Matos, Refuge and Evasion (2014), shown at IndieLisboa this year.

In an interview he gave to the PUBLIC the purpose of the premiere of Evil - a film about a set of “shipwrecked” in the contemporary world -the director explained that he needed to have a relationship with the environment in which he lived for being able to film: “I’ll Have maybe a pessimistic view of the contemporary world seen from Portugal [...], but extrapolating to the whole of western society. The difference between Evil and my other films is that these were some very concrete things: the 25th of November, the salazarismo, the returned. And this film is broader, it does not touch any theme absolutely Portuguese. I have some difficulty in working with what I know. I know all the characters in the film, are people that I know in real life, that transform and re-direct. Are not ‘inventions’.”