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João Canijo’s Blood of My Blood (2011) captures the harsh reality of living in the slums located on the outskirts of Lisbon. Living in Padre Cruz, a suburban town, the film follows a family that is struggling with violence and poverty. The film narrative shows the family attempting to overcome their hardships in their own individual ways. Whether it’s Marcia, the mother of the family, who is constantly making sure the family is well taken care of and fed, or her daughter, Claudia, who shows promise in her academic studies. However, Marcia’s dreams for Claudia are in conflict when she learns that Claudia is involved in an affair with her professor. Marcia is determined to end the affair even if the cost is losing her daughter. This dilemma forces Marcia to bring to light parts of her own past. On the other hand, Marcia’s son, Joca is involved in a drug dealing business and accumulates suspicious amounts of money. Another key character is Ivete, Marcia’s sister, who lives in the cramped house with Marcia’s family. Ivete is in her late thirties and deeply loves her family, but she yearns for companionship. Ultimately, Joca endangers Ivete at the end of the film in a risky deal with the gang leader. There are various narratives within the film: Marcia wishes for Claudia to live a better life than her, Joca tries to make a living through dangerous means, and Ivete is desperate for companionship. With multiple plotlines, it all comes together to highlight the interdisciplinary aspects of living in poverty.

The theme of Blood of Blood is familial bonds, poverty, and trauma. Through parallel shots and scenes, the film creates a feeling of claustrophobia and being in a cramped space. The soft lighting, and the tight space of Marcia’s house draws attention to the impoverished population in Portugal. However, the small space also functions to illustrate the tight bond between the family members, and the soft lighting emphasizes the close relationships in the family. The careful cinematography of the film reinforces the theme of family against the backdrop of poverty and life struggles.

As the film takes place in the modern era of Portugal, there are still values connected to Estado Novo. The close familial bonds connect to Portugal's fascist propaganda, which reinforced the idea of family and the patriarchy. However, the film also illustrates an evolution of traditional family structures. Estado Novo stressed the importance of family roles and Marcia still assumes the matriarchal position of feeding and taking care of the family, but there is an absence of an authoritative patriarchal figure in the household. Beyond the historical connections of the film, the narrative places women in power. The cast is women-dominant and the narrative is driven by the actions of Marcia, Claudia, and Ivete. Blood of My Blood connects well with our exhbit’s focus because it sheds light on the evolution of Estado Novo’s ideology of domestic family life, while reflecting the consciousness of Portugal’s impoverished population.

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Miguel Gomes’ Tabu (2012) weaves together the past and present realities that makeup the colonial nostalgia in the film, particularly through its use of romance and aesthetics. The film is split between Lisbon in 2010, named “Paradise Lost” where we meet an elderly Aurora in her last days and 1960 Mozambique, “Paradise”, where we see a younger, pregnant Aurora in an affair with fellow settler Gian Lucca.

The romances displayed in “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise” are separated by location and time in which the present day is unappealing and sobering. In contrast to the tiptoeing rendezvous between Gian Luca and Aurora in the 1960s, Middle-aged devout Catholic Pilar attends to the whims of an elderly Aurora where they dialogue in a deadpan manner. Other than Aurora and her maid Santa, Pilar has sheepish interactions with a man who is a tacky artist that tries to engage her in conversation about the futility of war as a pseudo-flirting tactic. Similar to the film’s nostalgic disposition, their romance does not go anywhere and remains virtually uninvestigated to the viewer in favor of Pilar seeking out deceased Aurora’s long lost love. The film in “Paradise Lost” inadvertently mourns a past Portugal where a loss of colonial power, Estado Novo and Lusophone African colonies, weakens the [ adjective ] of today’s Portugal.

Aesthetically, the film entices the audience to prefer the spatial freedom of Mount Tabu compared to cramped present day Lisbon. The scenes in “Paradise Lost”, such as Pilar on the bus with her admirer and Aurora’s racist bites to Santa create a dull landscape that is further dampened with the contemplative black and white. The shots are much more zoomed in on the characters as they dialogue in the women’s respective apartments that suffocate the viewer. Rather than an intellectual critique on Portuguese colonialism, Gomes presents an exoticized oasis in “Paradise”. Under colonial rule, Aurora had a spacious farm between the long shots of dry plains and Mount Tabu. This reflects the larger idea of postcolonial Portugal that is restrictive for its inhabitants. Younger Aurora was only forced to go home due to the Colonial War, making Lisbon an inopportune home of grief to her now lost lovely settler lifestyle.

As a Returnee, the Portuguese that formerly resided in Lusophone Africa now back in Portugal, Aurora was welcomed into an overwhelmingly unstable regime. The quips of westernization in Mozambique such as Aurora’s family’s lavish home and Gian Luca’s band of Lusophone covers of American pop hits exemplifies the delusion Portuguese settlers lived in that would soon cost. While on her final escapade out near the native villages with Gian Luca, they are caught by one of his band members. As the men tussle, Aurora shoots and kills him. Elderly Gian Luca narrates that the murder was the precursor to the Colonial War as the native Mozambicans were blamed. The political landscape of Lusophone Africa allowed for blissful ignorance amongst its white Portuguese inhabitants. The greed of the authoritarian regime and brewing Colonial war seemed far removed from the whims of their love affair.

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PORT129A Multimedia Assignment © 2025 by Kamiyah Williams, Lucca Necci, Katharine Chi is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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“We put an end to the Dictatorship’s poison but we found another poison to kill us.” (16:38) - That poison is neoliberal economics, and the privatization and gentrification of Portugal, after the fall of the regime. 

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Even after João makes a plea with the cops, invoking the status of his father and brother, the police are determined to take the house. The failure of João’s appeal to the cops represents the dissolution of older forms of patrimonial power found during the Estado Novo regime, as Portugal is folded into the global neoliberal sphere of influence. This dissolution of the Estado Novo regime, and the gentrification that followed can be understood as a transition towards “Societies of Control,” away from Foucalt’s notion of “disciplinary society.” In an essay titled Postscript Societies of Control, Gilles Deleuze observes governments transitioning away from overt forms of power like incarceration and execution towards less conspicuous forms of control like social conformity and financial debt. Deleuze’s essay provides greater context for this scene in Al Berto, which is a direct jab at neoliberal economics and the ravaging of Portugal by multinational corporations, following the collapse of the Estado Novo. Analyzing Al Berto through Deleuze reveals that the police exercise power on behalf of multinational corporations who seek to build gentrified neighborhoods in Portugal. Rather than acting as individuals, the police act on behalf of an institution, giving them a degree of separation from the impact of their actions. Like the police, multinational corporations provide a degree of separation between the ceo’s, executives, and board members, and the ordinary Portuguese who suffer the consequences of their actions. The impersonal, cold, calculated nature of both the police and multinational corporations is a key feature of 1970s Portugal, and characters in Al Berto liken corporate power to the fascist Estado Novo. To me, this scene in Al Berto, and Deleuze’s Postscript on Societies of Control are a reminder of how facism and (neo)liberalism are friendly cousins.

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Would you like to file a complaint? - A futile appeal to the faceless bureaucracy that will take their house. Now that the regime is gone, there isn't even a clear enemy to point at. 

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End of Estado Novo and the landscape of postcolonialism 

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End of Estado Novo and the landscape of postcolonialism 

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We chose this focus because we wanted to connect the past to the present and better understand the evolution of Portuguese cinema. Tracking the evolution of Estado Novo and the consciousness of Portuguese society allowed us to understand the relationship between history and modern day systems of thought. Noticing the string that connects all the films we chose is insightful to how Portuguese cinema emerged and coincides with the surrounding social landscape.