Northwest Film Forum

Made by four of film's masters, this quartet offers a layered set of views of a particular town in northern Portugal. 

Aki Kaurismäki, the Finnish filmmaker behind the drolly melancholic The Match Factory Girl, directs the silent film Tavern Man, which portrays a day-in-the-life of a man who works at a bar in a historic district of the city. Inside, time seems to have stopped; outside, the city is a rush of the new and the modern. 

Pedro Costa, whose film Ne Change Rien made many of our Top Ten lists two years ago, delivers a surrealist film called Sweet Exorcist, which probes the revolutionary events of 1974. Exorcist's protagonist is the memorable Ventura, a character who appeared in Costa's masterpiece Colossal Youth. As a participant in a coup d'etat by young commissioned officers, Ventura loses his way the woods, and is admitted into a mental hospital where he has conversations with "ghosts" of the past in the hospital's elevator. 

In Victor Erice's Broken Windows, former workers visit the site of a vacant factory, Rio Vizela, that closed after more than a century of production (it was one time an important part of the European textile industry) and share memories, including one focused on a photograph of the factory’s dining hall that stops everyone in their tracks. 

Manoel de Oliveira's Conquered Conqueror, finally, is a humorous short shot at the town of Guimarães’ fortress, with a group of tourists marching toward an imposing bronze statue of Afonso the 1st.