19-year-old Julio heads to Lisbon from the provinces and gets a job as a shoemaker for his uncle Raul. But when he meets Ilda, a confident young housemaid who becomes a regular shop visitor, the two begin a tentative romance until the realities of the outside world come crashing through.

Paulo Rocha’s The Green Years is one of the great Portuguese debuts. Now magnificently restored, this breathtakingly modern, Lisbon-set tale of urban acceleration and romantic turmoil takes the stylistic freshness of the contemporaneous French New Wave and cloaks it with an anguished melancholia.