Vale Abraão

This year, it is with great joy that we celebrate the 30th anniversary of Abraham’s Valley by Manoel de Oliveira (Directors’ Fortnight 1993) with actress Leonor Silveira and producer Paulo Branco in attendance. The adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary transposed to the
Portugal of the second half of the 20th century, which the director commissioned the author Augustina Bessa-Luís to write. Abraham’s Valley is a film of powerful eroticism and sensuality. “How a woman resists men, who are the power, using the force of her poetic vision of the world, even if it is just an illusion. Emma hangs onto lyricism, to the epic, to a way of making poetry from the world that surrounds her in order to resist the masculine characters, who see the world as nothing but a series of power games.” (Manoel de Oliveira, Cahiers du Cinéma n°469.)