Filming the unfilmable João César Monteiro’s first film premiered in a movie theatre, a young critic who stood out in the pages of the magazine O Tempo e o Modo and the newspaper Diário de Lisboa and who still introduced himself as João César Santos, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen is, in the words of the filmmaker himself, “the proof, for those who want to understand it, that poetry is not filmable and there is no use in pursuing it.” Produced by Ricardo Malheiro, a producer of dozens of touristic films and other commissioned cinematographic works, this short film by Monteiro is part of a series entitled Cultura Filmes, in which are included others about Fernando Namora, Júlio Resende, António Duarte (the three directed by Manuel Guimarães) and Fernando Lopes Graça (directed by António-Pedro Vasconcelos). The films intended to portray the daily life of artists from different areas that were relevant to Portuguese culture at the time. It is Monteiro himself, in his autobiography, that describes the contact: “It was an opportunity, but I did not believe very much that there was a producer willing to believe in a creature who, alongside with a total inexperience, could barely disguise a certain aversion to cinema dealers, and besides that my old clothes and this sub-nourished look did not inspire the slightest confidence. In fact, Malheiro would mess with me, saying, ‘Fuck! You look more like a beggar than with a filmmaker!’ However, [Alberto] Seixas [Santos] and then António-Pedro [Vasconcelos] convinced Malheiro that I was brilliant, even though they would not risk a penny on me. (...) Because, to tell the truth, no one believed I could make a movie. Perhaps even I did not believe it that much. I must confess that, for reasons that still elude me today, I did not have to resort to the so-called hypocrisy to get along with Malheiro. I really fancy the old man, even though a cold analysis of the character let me somewhat wilted. I suppose Malheiro also liked me and decided to give me a film, fact to which I am extremely sensitive to, especially after knowing that some people tried to dissuade him by claiming that I am barking mad.” In the summer of 1968, in a rather unusual way, Monteiro went to Lagos, in Algarve, where Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen was vacationing with her family. Unconventional, the filmmaker wanted to avoid the film-interview or a biopic narrated in off with images from the archives. Instead, taking advantage of all that familiar and relaxed context of the summer vacation by the sea, Monteiro did what João Bénard da Costa considered to be “a kind of home movie without any of the nonsense or fussiness of that kind of films.” Monteiro, still about the film, and facing the impossibility of filming poetry, suggests that “what is filmable is always something else that may or may not have a poetic quality. My film is the realization of this impossibility, and this intransigent shame makes it, I believe, poetic, malgré lui.” (PC)