Portuguese filmmaker Joao Botelho directs the political farce The Woman Who Believed She Was President of the United States. Alexandra Lencastre stars as the title character who thinks her home in Lisbon on Washington Street is really The White House. Surrounded by a cast of well-costumed women supporters, she proclaims “I am the President of the U.S.A.; I can do whatever I want!” While she locks up her mother (Laura Soveral) in the basement, she is aided by her Secretary of State (Rita Blanco). On her birthday, she throws a huge party in honor of her re-election and plans to control the entire world. —IMDb
João Botelho is the Portuguese filmmaker of memory, whose films seek to transform the physical into the metaphysical and to render ideas and poetry physical. His work is based on the word, a creative approach that is almost more poetic than cinematographic and which was already demonstrated in his debut feature, Conversa Acabada (1982), a conversation between two great Portuguese writers, Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro, that could be defined as an epistolary framework for an examination of what is articulated through different times and fashions: a conversation that is anything but ‘finished’ (‘acabada’).
His subsequent films include Hard Times (1987) and Aqui na Terra (1993), for which he wrote the screenplay. In 1999 he was in the Venice Film Festival with Se a Memória Existe which received a good critical reception. He returned to Venice with Quem és Tu? (2001) from a novel by Almeida Garrett called Frei Louis de Sousa, and in… read more
