Festival promotes at the Cine-Teatro de Alcobaça a contemporary review of the myth of Inês de Castro through some of the greatest works of filmmakers such as Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodovar, Jerzy Skolimowski and Mário Barroso
Cine-Teatro de Alcobaça – João d’Oliva Monteiro debuts on Sunday, July 3, another film series integrated in Cistermúsica 2011, this time entitled “Bodies of Inês”, an initiative that aims not only to follow the festival theme “Around Inês,” but it is above all a journey through a series of films where the myth of Inês of Castro – body sacrificed for love and by love enthroned to the condition of eternity – was reinstated and revised in the light of great visual narratives of the recent past in the world of cinema and under the sign of contemporaneity.
Opening the film series, on July 3, Sunday (the movies are always displayed at 9h30p.m.), we have “Breaking the waves” by Lars von Trier, a true masterpiece of Danish provocateur filmmaker, whose disturbing love story won the Grand Prix Jury of the Cannes Festival, with brilliant performances from Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgard. A day later, on July 4, Monday, it’s time for a national film: “A Doomed Love”, in what constitutes a free and inspired reinterpretation of one of the greatest works of Camilo Castelo Branco, one of the key writers of Portuguese literature.
The following week, July 10, Sunday, time to review one of the great films of Spanish director Pedro Almodovar who was inspired by a series of true events to recreate an unconditional romantic and intimate story that would eventually raise an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay: “Talk to Her.” At the end of the film series, July 11, Monday, opportunity to watch the return, after almost twenty years of absence, of one of the most respected Polish film directors, Jerzy Skolimowski, who in “Four Nights with Anna” gives us a chronicle of obsessive love that opened in 2008, the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes.
It remains to note that these are films where the body dimension of the lovers and their corresponding amount of sacrifices made ascend each one of the characters – like Inês de Castro – to a final and a higher plane of “royalty” and transcendence where the obsession with female body is its flagship brand. In this gallery of pictures so marked by the depth of their passion and ability to deliver her own body, flesh, blood and soul, to the nature of those living forces, we have the opportunity to see how in different cultures and languages, countries or latitudes, the example of Inês de Castro (driven to extremes and excess) met several different identities and visions. In other words: forbidden love that thanks to the crime of his feelings met inevitably tragedy, as if the tragedy was still and always the culmination of all these loves.
