Presentation of film - Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1969)

Presentation of the film Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1969) by João Cézar Monteiro; as part of a celebration of the centenary of the poet’s birth, by TORCH International Fellow Carolin Overhoff Ferreira.

João César Monteiro Santos was a Portuguese film director, actor, writer and film critic. Considered by many as one of the most controversial Portuguese filmmakers of his generation, João César Monteiro marked his presence in Cinema with unclassifiable and polemic films, weaved with idiosyncratic, somewhat experimental and highly referential aesthetics, which were influenced by his also being a film critic and a poet. In some of his latest films, he played a recurrent protagonist, João de Deus, a remarkably articulated and over-sexualized character whose customary attitudes involved spontaneous streaks of hedonism, cultural reference, scandal and satire.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen is part of a series of short-films dedicated to relevant personalities of Portuguese arts and literature produced by the company Cultura Filmes (1967–69) with support from the Gulbenkian Foundation. It was Monteiro's first completed film.