The film-essay Aventuras no Império: uma história mal contada [Adventures in the Empire: a poorly told story], written and directed by Rui Lopes, premiered today at Fidelidade Arte Lisboa, as part of the cinema cycle that accompanies the exhibition The Floor is Lava!.

The IHC researcher developed the film-essay based on the research he is carrying out “on the history of the representations of Portugal and the empire projected in foreign film and television fiction during the Estado Novo”, a topic which, as he tells us, “has revealed a more ambiguous vision of the country abroad”. Taking Macau as a case study, “this fiction combined a tourist imaginary (romance, casinos) with orientalist sensationalism (vice, violence), mixing colonial (and racist) rhetoric with a critical look at Portuguese colonialism (corrupt and unable to control smuggling and organised crime)”.

Rui Lopes wanted to “dismantle and reassemble these works, taking various types of sources (written documents and the films themselves) and approaching them through another academic object, using the audiovisual language itself to analyse the different voices and ideas that contributed to this imagination of Macau”. Challenged by Catarina Laranjeiro, co-curator of the exhibition (with Daniel Barroca), the historian then wrote the script for the film-essay and worked with editor Rui Ribeiro, crossing “excerpts from more than thirty fiction films and television series about Macau produced in different countries in the 1930s-70s, interspersed with press pieces, scripts, publicity and censorship reports, allowing a glimpse of the various paradoxes and artifices that materialised a certain colonial imaginary and spread it around the world”.

The film will be on show until 30 August, when it will be complemented by a talk by the author, at 5pm, “on the context that shaped this wave of productions, from the Cold War to the tensions and contradictions generated by the semi-peripheral status of Portuguese colonialism”. Also taking part in the session will be Nuno Sena, programmer at the Portuguese Cinematheque, and editor Rui Ribeiro.

Admission is free!