Friday 14 March at 21:45
Paulo Rocha’s debut The Green Years is a haunting coming-of-age tale set in 1960s Lisbon. Nineteen-year-old Julio moves from the provinces to the city where he becomes a shoemaker’s apprentice and begins a tentative romance with Ilda, a confident housemaid. As their relationship develops, their differing social environments – Julio’s low-class stigmatization and Ilda’s relative closeness to urban bourgeois life — clash, reflecting the cultural upheavals of the time, including the changes of the city and urban life under the dictatorship. Just returning from his film course in Paris where he witnesses the outburst of the Nouvelle Vague and does an internship with Renoir, Paulo Rocha combines his sophisticated cultural background with acute social sensiblity, opening the road to the New Cinema amidst the decaying panorama of commercial productions. Winner of Best First Film at the 1964 Locarno Film Festival.
Restoration
The new digital restoration was made from a new digital master created when the director was still alive and on his own initiative. The different stages of the restoration were supervised by director Pedro Costa at the Cinemateca Portuguesa - Museu do Cinema.
