- Opinion by Miguel Esteves Cardoso
- Photogallery: António-Pedro Vasconcelos, the man who wanted to take Portuguese cinema out of its “smallness”
- Video: six films to understand António-Pedro Vasconcelos
- Reactions: the filmmaker who “fought the right fights”
Director António-Pedro Vasconcelos died on Tuesday night at Hospital da Luz, in Lisbon, just a few days before his 85th birthday. Active participant in many of the debates that marked democratic Portugal, occasional polemicist, fervent Benfica fan — a status that made him familiar with the general television audience —, dedication to these many parallel causes, from Mário Soares’ presidential campaign to cultural policy and the struggle against the privatization of TAP, never obscured his passion for cinema. It is due to him one of the most significant critical and box office successes in cinema ever made in Portugal, The Place of the Dead (1984), alongside works of notable commercial impact such as Jaime (1999) or Call Girl (2007). Begun before the 25th of April, his filmography ended up being limited to 12 fiction feature films and a couple of documentaries.
“Each year, each month, each day of this extraordinary life that passed by our side made us the happiest people in the world. And, certainly, also many others, thanks to their work, their talent, their countless struggles and countless passions”, highlights the director’s family in the statement sent to the newsroom this morning. “Today, more than ever, we are sure that our A-PV, who fought so hard for us all to be fairer, more correct, more aware, always as serious and dignified as him, will always be an Immortal. We know well how lucky we were. We will always live full of pride.”
Born in Leiria on March 10, 1939, A-PV, Nickname who became a password for his friends, was part of the “second generation” of Cinema Novo, along with Alberto Seixas Santos (1936-2016), João César Monteiro (1939-2003) or José Fonseca e Costa (1933-2015). In a long conversation with PÚBLICO in 2018, regarding the comprehensive retrospective that Cinemateca Portuguesa then dedicated to him, he regretted that his generation had never truly fulfilled its potential. In this interview, he spoke of the differences that were already emerging at the end of the 1960s within the wave of directors that emerged after the avant-garde of António da Cunha Telles, Fernando Lopes, Paulo Rocha or Manuel Faria de Almeida. His group was “the São Remo pastry shop”, which also included screenwriter Carlos Saboga, Seixas Santos and César Monteiro.
In fact, his long-standing friendship with the truculent João César Monteiro and the unconditional support he always gave to the author of Memories of Casa Amarela, despite being an outspoken critic of what he considered a drift of Portuguese production towards the field of auteur cinema, after the 25th of April. He considered this cinema to be disconnected from national reality — unlike his own.
“My cinema has never been disconnected from reality”, he said in the aforementioned 2018 interview. What interests me is fiction, and the role that fiction has in societies and civilizations. I am incapable of filming a reality without trying to understand it.”
A Law student, a course he never finished, António-Pedro Vasconcelos approached Sétima Arte through criticism, “the continuation of an absolutely crazy passion for discovering cinema”, which he practiced in newspapers News Diary e Republic and in magazines Image, Time and Mode, Colloquium or Cinephile. In the early 1960s, he became a scholarship holder at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and went to study cinema at the Sorbonne, in Paris. There he did his true cinematographic “learning”, alongside Alberto Seixas Santos (1936-2016), attending sessions at the Cinematheque Française and seeing first-hand the Nouvelle Vague films that so inspired his generation.
He made his first institutional short films at the end of that decade, later becoming one of the founders of the Centro Português de Cinema (CPC), a structure supported by Gulbenkian that sought to give new impetus to Portuguese cinematographic production, financing a group of filmmakers with “ urgency to make cinema.” This group, in addition to their comrades from São Remo, included “young people” such as José Fonseca e Costa, Fernando Matos Silva and Alfredo Tropa and “veterans” such as António de Macedo, Artur Ramos or José Ernesto de Sousa.
It was within the scope of the CPC that he made his feature film debut in 1973 with Lost by a Hundred…followed by two documentaries about Portuguese emigration: Goodbye, Until My Return (1974) e EmigratingBefore… and After? (1976). He would only return to fiction in 1980, with I hope, premiered at the Venice Festival, a “point of the situation” of its generation that reflected the influence of the Nouvelle Vague and that would achieve notable commercial success for the time (90 thousand spectators, according to data from the Cinema and Audiovisual Institute). Along with Lost by a Hundred… and the later The Place of the Deadthis film would form a very personal trilogy of fictions, whose protagonists were, in his words, “extensions” of his person.
António-Pedro Vasconcelos in the 1990s PAULO RICCA/ARQUIVO
By that time, A-PV had already begun to move away cinematically from the generation with which it had grown up. The success of The Place of the Dead, a police film with Ana Zanatti and journalist Pedro Oliveira in the main roles, which had an extraordinary 270 thousand spectators when it premiered in 1984, seemed to promise a new lease of life; and the filmmaker actually took the opportunity to aim higher, launching a historic co-production with France and Spain, set in 19th century Lisbon. Here from El Rei! (1991), based on an idea by historian Vasco Pulido Valente (1941-2020), and with a cast led by the French Ludmila Mikael, Jean-Pierre Cassel and Arnaud Giovaninetti, it did not, however, gain favor with the public.
Almost simultaneously, aware of the profound changes, at a global level, in cinema and television production, and that the economy of the industry was no longer restricted to the living room and television exhibition but began to involve formats of home video, A-PV takes many years away from completion. He began as coordinator of the National Secretariat for Audiovisual between 1991 and 1993 and was then president of the working group for the European Commission’s Green Paper on the audiovisual industry. “A fundamental mission to bring Portuguese cinema out of its smallness”, he told PÚBLICO in 2018, as “an integrated audiovisual policy was needed” and “help to internationalize Portuguese cinema”. He accepted these institutional positions despite the fact that his political positions were at odds with the ideas of the governments with which he worked.
He returned to filmmaking in the late 1990s, entering his most productive, and also most popular, period, with a series of films that he defined as inspired by contemporary Portuguese reality and classic cinema. From Jaime, a work about the drama of child labor, inspired by Elia Kazan and Vittorio de Sica with which it reaches 220 thousand spectators and wins the SIC Golden Globes for best film and best director, António-Pedro Vasconcelos begins filming with a regularity that I had never characterized him until then. And always with appreciable box office success — he was “concerned with anticipating the public’s reaction”, just like the great masters of literature, opera or cinema.
Over the following two decades, it aligned The immortals (2003); Call Girl (2007), its second most watched title ever, with 230 thousand viewers, and the SIC Golden Globe for best film; Beauty and the Paparazzo (2010), which he considered his “most perfect film”; Cats Don’t Get Vertigo (2014), Sophia awards for best film and best director, which he defined as a variation on Umberto D e David Copperfield; Impossible love (2015), again awarded the Sophia award for best film; It is Mayer Park (2018), with which he won Sophia for best director twice, “a tribute to Jean Renoir and his constant tribute to the public”.
Despite the awards and box office successes, he was always deeply frustrated at never having seen his films reach the level of consecration and international circulation of Portuguese auteur cinema. He defended the right to the existence of this more authorial production, but fought against what he considered to be a structural bias in the financing system. In 2010, he said in another interview with PÚBLICO that “Portuguese cinema is made by individuals who the State decides are filmmakers and who make, in most cases, autistic cinema, which is not scrutinized by anyone”. Even then, he defended the need to “put an end to the support system as it exists today” and to completely restructure the ICA organization and the current financing methodology itself.
The full retrospective that Cinemateca Portuguesa dedicated to him coincided, ironically, with the Football World Cup that took place in Russia that year — the sport was one of his great passions, having been a commentator in the newspapers Record e The Independent and, flying the colors of Sport Lisboa and Benfica, in the program Attack Triofrom RTP, between 2004 and 2010. In addition to numerous opinion columns on civil society — including in PÚBLICO — he published three books: Why don’t women like football? (2001), collection of chronicles published in the press; Public Service Private Interests (2003), his contribution to the debate surrounding public service television; It is A Filmmaker Condemned to Be Free — Dialogue with José Jorge Letria (2016).
His latest film premiered in 2022, KM 224which also marked his reconciliation with producer Paulo Branco, with whom he founded VO Filmes in the late 1970s. The filmmaker was currently preparing an adaptation of Lavagante, by José Cardoso Pires, and a documentary about the behind-the-scenes of 25 de Abril for RTP. She leaves two children: the director of casting Patrícia Vasconcelos and collector Pedro Jaime Vasconcelos, from his first marriage to Maria Helena Guerra.
António-Pedro Vasconcelos’ wake will take place this Thursday at Gare Marítima de Alcântara, in Lisbon, from 3pm to 10pm; The funeral will follow at 1:30 pm on Friday at Cemitério dos Prazeres.