Cinemateca Portuguesa and Batalha join forces in a program

Cinemateca Portuguesa, in Lisbon, and Cinema Batalha, in Porto, are associated with this event, programming some sessions dedicated to Portuguese animation cinema. In Lisbon, "Antonio Maria's Nightmare" is shown on Thursday, opening an extended cycle at the Cinemateca, in collaboration with the Lisbon Animation Festival - Monstra, which will run throughout 2023. 13 films will be shown, covering animation cinema between 1923 and 1985, including advertising films from Armando Servais Tiago and Artur Correria, "two of the most important names in Portuguese animation from the 1940s to the 1970s" and Abi Feijó's first short, "Oh que calm".

In Porto, in the renovated Batalha - Centro de Cinema room, "The nightmare of António Maria" will be shown on the 25th - precisely one hundred years after its first public exhibition -, in a session scheduled in partnership with Casa da Animação. Nine other short films will also be shown, similarly to the Cinemateca session. The two initiatives, in Lisbon and Porto, will be presented by Paulo Cambraia.

"The nightmare of António Maria", from 1923, is considered the first animated film of Portuguese cinema, directed by the caricaturist Joaquim Guerreiro in a satire on the politician António Maria Silva, of the First Republic, and premiered on January 25 of that year in Lisbon. Since there are no records of copies of that original film, the version that survives today is a reconstitution based on the original drawings by Joaquim Guerreiro, in a re-editing made in 2001 by producer and director Paulo Cambraia, one of the experts in animation cinema in Portugal. Even so, "The nightmare of António Maria" is considered "the first film in the history of national animation", as can be read on the official page of Casa da Animação, which is why this month is celebrating its centenary. and, symbolically, the emergence of animation cinema in Portugal.