SILVESTRE

João César Monteiro (1939-2003) endures as one of the most provocative and influential figures of Portuguese cinema. At once a dandy and a pauper, a hedonist and a monk, a revolutionary and a classicist, a realist and a romantic, Monteiro was an artist of profound contradictions. His films are an unholy marriage: a wicked burlesque sensibility wed to the formal rigor of a high modernist, shot through with a poet’s delight in the reveries of language and music. Pinching from the high and the low, he synthesized the avant-garde with a popular spectacle; his work is “an intervention in public life,” a revolt against decency and established order. As a frequent performer in his own films, Monteiro struck an indelible onscreen presence. In the guise of his signature alter ego, João de Deus, he embodied a ribald mischief-maker recalling both Jerry Lewis and Erich von Stroheim, the clown and the devil wrapped into one. Bringing a touch of madness to all that he did, Monteiro's cinema is fueled by a gourmand appetite for life in all its sordid and sumptuous variety. Now, thanks to this monumental restoration effort, his body of work can rightly be appreciated as one of the most astonishing achievements of 20th-century filmmaking.

SILVESTRE
For Maria de Medeiros’s first film role, in which she disguises herself as a male knight to live and love freely without the interference of a dangerous suitor, João César Monteiro created a theatrical representation of medieval life, complete with mythical creatures and painted and front-projected backdrops. Taking inspiration from the story of Bluebeard and Portuguese fables, SILVESTRE is a radical take on the historical film, and one of the best examples in Portuguese cinema of the confluence between reality and fantasy.