João César Monteiro
Portuguese film director, actor, writer and film critic (1939-2003)
João César Monteiro Santos (2 February 1939 – 3 February 2003) was a Portuguese film director, actor, writer and film critic. He is known for writing and directing films such as Recollections of the Yellow House (1989), God's Comedy (1995) and As Bodas de Deus (1999)
Life and career
João César Monteiro was born into a family with anti-fascist and anti-clerical ideals. His family moved to Lisbon when Monteiro was 15 years old to enable him to continue his studies. In 1963, with a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Monteiro traveled to Great Britain to study at the London Film School (known then as the London School of Film Technique). In 1965 in Portugal, he began work on his first film, Quem Espera por Sapatos de Defunto Morre Descalço (Who Waits for the Deceased's Shoes Dies Barefoot), which would not be finished for five years due to financial problems. At the same time, he made the short documentary "Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen", about the Portuguese poet. Monteiro also wrote film criticism for periodicals like Imagem, Diário de Lisboa and O Século.
His first feature film was Fragmentos de um Filme Esmola: A Sagrada Família (1972). In 1982 he made Silvestre an adaptation of traditional Portuguese folk stories. Silvestre was shown at the Venice Film Festival and was an important step in his international recognition.
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This entry incorporates text from “João César Monteiro” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.