One of the greatest screenwriters of Portuguese cinema, with an extensive and award-winning body of work, over the years Carlos Saboga worked, without diplomas and with more or less conviction and assiduity, as he liked to say, as a translator, assistant director, journalist (columnist, reporter, correspondent, film critic), in print, radio and television. He participated, in various capacities, in films such as La Jeune Morte (1965) by Claude Faraldo, Il Sasso in Bocca (1969) by Giuseppe Ferrara, Jacquou le Croquant (1969) by Stellio Lorenzi. He wrote screenplays for television and cinema, in Portugal and in France, collaborating, among others, with Portuguese directors António-Pedro Vasconcelos, José Fonseca e Costa, Luís Galvão Telles, Fernando Lopes and Mário Barroso and with the Chileans Raul Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento.
In 1973, at the Pesaro Film Festival, António-Pedro Vasconcelos introduced him to Paulo Branco. It would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship and it was he who encouraged Paulo Branco to embrace the adventure of the Action République cinema in Paris.
Over these five decades they worked together on various projects and Saboga was the screenwriter of several films produced by Branco: Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) by Raul Ruiz; Lines of Wellington (2012) and The Black Book (2018) by Valeria Sarmiento; The Miracle According to Salomé (2004), Doomed Love (2008) and Moral Order (2021) by Mário Barroso, and, recently, he again adapted Camilo Castelo Branco in Memories of Prison, by Sérgio Graciano, which he still had the opportunity to see, and which will premiere in Portugal in September 2026.
In interviews, he confessed that when he began working in cinema as an assistant director, his project was one day to become a director. Saboga directed two films, whose screenplays he also wrote, both produced by Paulo Branco: Photo (2012, Rome Festival) and At an Uncertain Time (2015, Vienna Festival), which share the theme of exile. At the premiere of the second, he answered in an interview: “Perhaps, who knows, because exile, forced or chosen, is a dramatically interesting starting point that allows the author a, let us say, more distanced gaze over the two shores, the one that was left and the one that was reached. But I suppose autobiography should not be entirely foreign to this attraction toward exiles with the vague perfume of desertion, even of betrayal… plus the consequent feeling of guilt that gnaws at them…”. In that year, 2015, Medeia Filmes dedicated a tribute to him at the Monumental and Nimas cinemas, programming the two films he directed and a selection of several whose screenplay he wrote, and in which, besides Saboga, directors, actors and the producer Paulo Branco took part.
He also served twice as a jury member at LEFFEST: in 2010, on the jury of the European Film Schools Meeting, and in 2013, on the Official Competition jury.
In 2023, the Portuguese Film Academy distinguished Carlos Saboga with the Sophia Career Award, “for the immeasurable impact he has had on Portuguese cinema since the 1980s”. Paulo Branco, invited to present the award, spoke of the “very personal and demanding friendship” that united them over five decades, and added that Saboga “brought him a view and a vision of cinema and of the world very close to his own”.