The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Special Program: Eterna Biblioteca

Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest Portuguese poets of all times, established throughout his life a gigantic parallel universe where the entirety of his heteronyms came to life. The story of one of them, Ricardo Reis, was imagined by José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1998, in his novel O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (1984) and has now been adapted to cinema by Portuguese filmmaker João Botelho. The story takes place in 1936. After 16 years of exile in Brazil, Ricardo Reis returns to Portugal and settles in at Hotel Bragança. During a dark period in history, marked by Mussolini's fascism, the rise of Hitler's Nazism, the Spanish Civil War and the Salazarist authoritarianism of Estado Novo in Portugal, Ricardo Reis meets his creator, Fernando Pessoa, with whom he gets lost in discussions about life and the world.

Duration: 129
Production year: 2020
Country: Portugal
Subtitles: VO PT

João Botelho

João Botelho is a Portuguese director and screenwriter, born in 1949. His directorial debut in a feature-film happened with the drama Conversa Acabada, which had its world premiere at the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, in 1982. Two films followed after that, Um Adeus Português (1985) and Tempos Difíceis – Este Tempo (1988), an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) to a Portuguese context which won the FIPRESCI Prize in Venice. Botelho revisited the works of Almeida Garrett with Quem És Tu? (2000), which earned him the Mimmo Rotella Foundation Award in Venice, of Diderot with O Fatalista (2005), of Agustina Bessa-Luís with A Corte do Norte (2008), as well as Pessoa with Filme do Desassossego (2010). Inspired by the classic novel of the same name by Eça de Queirós, his 2014 feature Os Maias became the most watched Portuguese film in theatres that year, exceeding 100 thousand spectators. He went on to direct O Cinema, Manoel de Oliveira e Eu (2016), his love letter to Manoel de Oliveira, and two years later released the historical drama Peregrinação (2018). Throughout his 43-year-long career, Botelho’s films have been regularly screened in Cannes, Rome, Venice, Berlin, Belfort, among other festivals, where he was distinguished with several awards. His most recent film O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (2020) adapts the iconic novel of the same name written by José Saramago.