In addition to Estado Novo propaganda and anticolonial documentaries, the Portuguese empire was fictionalised in Hollywood crime films, European spy sagas and Hong Kong action cinema. Macau's sampans and casinos became a recurring on-screen presence, imagined through a touristic and romantic lens (the ‘Monte Carlo of the Orient‘), but also filled with vice, piracy, violence and corruption (’the most perverse city in the world').

The hallucinatory audiovisual collage by historian Rui Lopes combines excerpts from more than thirty films and television series produced in the 1930s-70s, interspersed with news pieces, scripts, advertisements and censorship reports, allowing us to glimpse the various paradoxes and artifices that embodied this colonial imaginary and spread it around the world.

Rui Lopes is a researcher at the Instituto de História Contemporânea (IHC) of the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and IN2PAST Laboratory. The audiovisual essay we are showing is part of his academic research under the programmes FCT Investigador and CEEC Individual from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia.

PROJECTION:
Aventuras no Império: uma história mal contada (2024)
Written and directed by: Rui Lopes
Editing: Rui Lopes & Rui Ribeiro
Duration: 44 minutos