While the artistic work of Luís Noronha da Costa (1942–2020) has been regularly revived over the years, his films have rarely been shown. In this screening, we revisit two of his most emblematic films, demonstrating the relationship between moving image and pictorial figuration. In O Construtor de Anjos (1979), an atmospheric work resembling a romantic Gothic dream, the waters of baptism become the waters of death in a sinister religious ritual. A few years earlier, with D. Jaime ou a Noite Portuguesa, Noronha da Costa enters the Portuguese “night” with the incandescent, sensory magic of an amor fou at the heart of a tragedy, in a film clearly inspired by German and British romanticism and, in cinema, by Hammer horror.

Screening presented by Nuno Faria (director of Museu Arpad Szenes — Vieira da Silva)