Screened as part of NZIFF 2010

The Portuguese Nun 2009

A Religiosa Portuguesa

Directed by Eugène Green

A young French actress playing a nun has a profound encounter with a real Portuguese nun during the shooting in Lisbon. An eccentric study of religious doubt steeped in the beauty of Lisbon and the sadness of fado.

France / Portugal In Finnish and Portuguese with English subtitles
127 minutes

Director, Screenplay

Producers

Luis Urbano
,
Sandro Aguilar

Photography

Raphäel O’Byrne

Editor

Valérie Loiseleux

Production designer

Zé Branco

Costume designer

Margarida Morins

With

Leonor Baldaque (Julie de Hauranne)
,
Ana Moreira (Irmã Joana)
,
Adrien Michaux (Martin Dautand)
,
Beatriz Batarda (Magdalena)
,
Diogo Dória (D. Henrique Cunha Mello de Lencastre)
,
Carloto Cotta (D. Sebastião)
,
Francisco Mozos (Vasco)
,
Eugène Green (Denis Verde)

Festivals

Locarno 2009; Rotterdam, San Francisco 2010

Elsewhere

American-born French director Eugène Green follows his sublimely eccentric Le Pont des Arts (NZIFF05) with an equally intriguing and formally self-conscious study of another young artist in existential crisis. The new film is as transfixed as its heroine by Lisbon and the melancholy beauty of fado. — BG

“Strewn with long silences and even longer takes, this is a deadpan reverie on love and faith, film and life. Yet it’s also impishly poetic and singularly moving… In Lisbon to shoot De Guilleragues’ Letters of a Portuguese Nun, atheist actress Leonor Baldaque has an epiphany after encountering Sister Ana Moreira in a backstreet church. Some will bridle at Eugène Green’s highly stylised minimalism, the self-reflexive friskiness, the surfeit of literary and cinematic references and the extended fado interludes. But for all its idiosyncratic charm, this is a deceptively passionate and poignant picture.” — David Parkinson, The Guardian