The director, Manoel de Oliveira, is in the Porto house where he has lived for decades, preparing to leave due to mounting debts. He addresses the audience directly, discussing family history, cinema, and architecture, sharing home movies, and reenacting his run-in with the military dictatorship.

Manoel de Oliveira’s long-hidden documentary is an intimate self-portrait of a master, flooded with ruminations on spaces, cinema, and life under a dictatorship. Laid over a lilting Beethoven concerto or the patient whirr of a film projector, past memories startlingly coalesce into concrete poetry.