Tuesday 18 March at 21:30

Like Oliveira’s Non, Margarida Cardoso’s first feature reminds us that the country where the dictatorship finally collapsed was a country at war (the Colonial War, or the Liberation War for the African peoples in arms), and that the war was at the core of the very causes for the regime to fall. The film adapts a novel by the contemporary writer Lídia Jorge, on the life of the Portuguese community in colonized Moçambique, in the last years of the regime. Arrived in the colony to marry Luís (the groom mobilized for war), Evita quickly plunges into the underlying reality of the artificial, theatricalized, almost dreamlike social life of a community on the verge of explosion. The diegetic time of the film is the time of her inner transformation, converting all the illusions into the awareness of the others’ transformations (above all Luís, but also Helena, his captain’s wife, the other strong female character of the film) to the point of the unbearable. A “reverse shot” on the war and women by an important woman director.

Restoration

The digitisation was implemented by the Cinemateca Portuguesa - Museu do Cinema with the financial support of the National Cinema Plan.