Award-winning French director Eugène Green’s latest feature, The Portuguese Nun, premieres at the Institute of Contemporary Arts from 21st to 30th January 2011 before touring to venues around the country.
Green’s international acclaim has been reflected in a retrospective at the Ciné Lumière in 2007 and sell-out screenings at the London Film Festival. His works include Le Pont Des Arts (2004), Le Monde Vivant (2003) and Toutes Les Nuits (2001).
Displaying Green’s distinctive minimalist style, the film follows Julie de Hauranne (Leonor Baldaque), a young French actress whose mother is Portuguese, as she visits Lisbon for the first time. She is there to act in a film inspired by Guilleragues’ Letters Of A Portuguese Nun, an infamous 17th-century work, widely believed to be a work of epistolary fiction.
Julie becomes fascinated by a nun who prays each night at the Nossa Senhora do Monte Chapel on Graça Hill. During her stay, the young woman has a number of encounters that, at first, seem ephemeral and without consequence. But one night, after finally speaking with the nun, she glimpses her destiny and the meaning of her life.
The Portuguese Nun joins an eclectic tradition of films featuring nuns and monks: from the recent Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods And Men (2010) and Michael Whyte’s Notting Hill-based documentary No Greater Love (2009), to classics such as Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947), Manoel de Oliveira’s The Convent (1995), Fred Zinnemann’s The Nun’s Story (1959), Ken Russell’s controversial The Devils (1971), and a section of Rossellini's neorealist epic Paisà (1946).
Film: The Portuguese Nun
Release date: 21st January 2011
Certificate: TBC
Running time: 127 mins
Director: Eugène Green
Starring: Leonor Baldaque, Francisco Mozos, Diogo Dória, Ana Moreira, Eugène Green
Genre: Drama
Studio: ICA
Format: Cinema
Country: Portugal/France
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