Brandos Costumes

Produced in 1972–73, but only finished after the revolution, Brandos Costumes is an essay-film about the patriarchal family — one of the ideological cornerstones of the Salazar dictatorship — crossed with the liberation discourse of “class struggle”. Weaving together archive images of Salazar’s rise and rhetoric with the fictional story of a family and its dread of the “father figure”, Alberto Seixas Santos recreates a heedlessly violent way of life. A milestone film in the transition to democracy, it denounces the invention of a national identity based on “good morals”, which would mark Portuguese society for decades.