In the Darkness of the Night

Noite Escura

Portugal

2004

94 Min

Color

1.85:1

Portuguese, Russian

Currently 3.9/5 Stars.
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SCR João Canijo, Pierre Hodgson, Mayanna von Ledebur

CAST Fernando Luís, Rita Blanco, Beatriz Batarda, Cleia Almeida, Natalya Simakova, José Raposo, Dmitry Bogomolov, João Reis, Anna Belozorovich, António Ferreira

SOUND Ricardo Leal, Philippe Morel

Cannes (Un Certain Regard), BAFICI (João Canijo)

Synopsis

João Canijo’s movie adapts a Greek tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis (Euripides) to a provincial Portuguese family that has to cope with the Russian Mafia after a deal went wrong. In a place where everything is bought and sold even the youngest daughter may have to be offered for prostitution to make up for a deal that went terribly wrong. Noite Escura explores the emotions of a small family that runs a provincial whorehouse, having to sell their youngest in order to survive. —IMDb

Director

João Canijo

João Canijo (born 1957) is a Portuguese film director. His film Get a Life was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.

Canijo is one of the most prominent Portugese filmmakers and stage directors of his generation. From 1980 to 1985 he worked as an assistant director to Manoel de Oliveira, Wim Wenders, Alain Tanner and Werner Schroeter, among others. In 1988, his first film Three Less Me was selected for the Rotterdam Film Festival. Since then his other films, such as Her Mother’s Daughter (1990), Black Shoes(1998), and Get a Life (2001), have met a significant success with the critics as well as the public in Portugal. —(http://paginas.fe.up.pt/~iatu2006/JoaoCanijo.htm)