Portuguese women filmmakers and the Estado Novo: from invisibility to cultural memory

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Margarida Esteves
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/66511
• topic: Women filmmakers; Portugal; Estado Novo; Solveig Nordlund; Memory; Mulheres cineastas; Memória; Humanidades::Línguas e Literaturas

This paper aims to offer a general perspective ofthe presence (or, rather, absence) of female filmmakers during the Estado Novoperiod. If, on the one hand, the situation of the Portuguese filmmakers must be framed within the context of the regime’s ideology with regard to women (Cova &Pinto 2002), on the other hand, we cannot ignore the wider context of the presence/absence of women filmmakers in cinema during the twentieth century. Thus, the issue will be framed within previous work devoted to the question of women and film in a wider context (cf. Butler 2002; Lauzen2019; White 2017); as regards the Portuguese case, the study takes as a starting point work done by Castro (2000) and Pereira (2016). We also claimthat this invisibility, as regards the New State regime, has been counterbalanced by the appearance in recent years of a number of documentaries made by women who arerecovering thememory of the regime. Finally, the article will focus ona film by Swedish filmmaker Solveig Nordlund, titled Mitt Andra Land[My Other Country] (2014), arguing that it establishes a bridge between individual memory and collective memory byinvoking the personal experience of thefilmmaker,who starts working in Portugal in the 1970s.