This is the second version of Os Lobos. The first, screened in Lisbon and Porto in 1923, was longer than the second, which came out in Lisbon in 1924. There is no know copy of the first version. Os Lobos, by the Italian Rino Lupo, has often been considered the masterpiece of the first period of Portuguese cinema, the period of “Portuguese cinema made by foreign directors”. Lupo had already worked as an actor and director on around twenty films shot in different European countries before working in Portugal. In Paris (where he worked with Perret), Berlin, Copenhagen, Moscow, Warsaw. It was from Warsaw that Lupo set off for Portugal in 1921, where he shot seven films between 1921 and 1929. He then moved to Spain, Rome and finally Berlin where he died in 1933. The film tells the story of a small mountain community whose daily calm is shattered by the arrival of Ruivo, “the old sea dog”, whose love affairs have already caused the death of one man. Ruivo carries on with his philandering in the mountains, but this time he cannot escape “the mountain dog” Tonio’s revenge. Os Lobos defines the characteristics that became constant features of the best Portuguese cinema: the creation of a poetic dimension around the script, or even at odds with it; the establishment of a plastic representation, which frames the dramatic representation; the collection of quotes and scattered memories that crowd an imaginary world that is recognisable not for what it is but for the way it fluctuates. If there is a “school of Portuguese cinema”, as some claim, it has its roots in this eccentric film that deserves a place in any respectable anthology of the unusual. It is a “flamboyant” work, as one would describe the late Gothic period, somewhere between hyperrealism and surrealism, a high point of the aesthetic of the unusual, that has rarely achieved such a powerful and unique impact on our collective imagination.

João Bénard da Costa – Cinemateca Portuguesa