Porto of My Childhood

With the freedom and rigor that were his trademarks, Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira returned to Porto, the city where he had been born ninety-three years before, for this sublimely evocative documentary collage. The Porto of this childhood is a city laden with history, a city of artists and thinkers. As in a spiral, the film moves from the ruins of the house where the filmmaker was born to the streets of the city that, in 1896, saw the birth of cinema in Portugal. PORTO OF MY CHILDHOOD takes the form of a search: fragments of memories, footprints, testimonies, song lyrics, and photographs are all portals to a distant past that echoes into the present.