"Integral João César Monteiro" cycle

The great libertine of Portuguese cinema returns to cinemas. It's time to (re)discover João César Monteiro, in his entirety, in digital copies restored by the Portuguese Cinematheque. While Oliveira ritualizes and theatricalizes, César bites. He feeds on Sade, symbolism, and surrealism to film pleasure, ruin, and the sublime, in an anarchic and anti-clerical gesture that denounces fascism in all its masks. Between Lisbon and delirium, João de Deus is born, a saint in reverse, patron saint of the poor, the sick, and sex workers. César dons his skin in Recordações da Casa Amarela, Comédia de Deus and As Bodas de Deus. A Nosferatu wanders through poetic and decadent streets. The sacred and the profane appear together, without moral sieve. The ghost that crosses everything is that of freedom. And there is the final provocation: Branca de Neve. Walser on the black screen, only voices. Paulo Branco will remember the director's panic: "it's all black and black." A film that compels us to invent images, like children to whom a secret is whispered. To paraphrase Manuel Gusmão, poet and friend of César, let us return to these films with the certainty that they will bring us the incorruptible joy of an "inhospitable beauty".