Our Father – The Last Days of a Dictator, by director and researcher José Filipe Costa, received three awards at the Caminhos do Cinema Português festival, whose 31st edition ended in Coimbra on 22 November.

José Filipe Costa’s first feature film was awarded the Best Fiction Award and two Technical and Artistic Awards: Best Performance for Catarina Avelar, who plays Maria de Jesus, Salazar’s housekeeper, and Best Make-Up for Maria Almeida (Nani). The jury considered that “José Filipe Costa’s film demonstrates how everything is fiction, even the discourse that politicians make about themselves, and this ‘Our Father’, ours because it is about us, is a film about a country that helped to feed the lie, asking what lies we are willing to accept today.”.

At the festival’s closing ceremony, upon receiving the award, José Filipe Costa confessed that “it’s not easy to persuade people to make a film about Salazar,” adding that he “realized that many people don’t know that Salazar [after his chair accident] returned to São Bento and that they then staged a performance for him.” For the director, “this is a symptom,” since “it says a lot about the Estado Novo, it says a lot about the fascist regime, and it says a lot about us today. Today we are feeling echoes of what that Portugal was like.”

At the same festival, Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm also received the Technical and Artistic Award for Best Screenplay, on which José Filipe Costa himself and researcher Miguel Carmo, among others, collaborated, as we reported here in May this year.

Congratulations to both!