Manoel de oliveira biography of michael

Very few artists can boast a career spanning more than 80 years and even fewer can claim to have been at their artistic and critical peak when approaching, and indeed reaching, their own centenary.

However, both of these things were true of Manoel de Oliveira, arguably Portugal’s greatest filmmaker and unquestionably cinema’s most longstanding director, who passed away on April 2 this year at the age of 106.

Manoel Cândido Pinto de Oliveira was born on December 11, 1908, in Porto and began his filmmaking career in 1931 with a 20-minute silent documentary about his home city’s famous river, Douro, faina fluvial.

Douro Faina Fluvial from joão sobral on Vimeo.

His first full-length feature was the 1942 children’s parable, Aniki-Bóbó (see Manuel António Pina’s study of the film at C203.d.3820).

In common with almost all of Oliveira’s subsequent works, this was a literary adaptation (in this case of a short story by José Rodrigues de Freitas), which