Tribute
April 22
Time: 9:15 P.M.
Venue: Batalha Centro de Cinema - Sala 1
In continuity with the annual tributes to Portuguese women filmmakers that Porto Femme has been developing, this edition highlights Raquel Soeiro de Brito, recognizing her pioneering path and her singular contribution to cinema and to moving images in Portugal.
In a year in which the festival summons the pioneers of Portuguese cinema, this tribute gains special meaning. Having recently celebrated the centenary of her birth, her work continues to be fundamental for understanding the relations between cinema, territory, and the observation of the world.
Through a careful gaze at geographies, landscapes, and communities, her films build a singular body of work, revealing different ways of seeing, inhabiting, and interpreting the world!
Raquel Soeiro de Brito | She/Her
Biographical note (written by the author herself):
Raquel Soeiro de Brito (1925), geographer and researcher, graduated in Geographical Sciences (1948) with the thesis “O Soajo – Geographical notes on a village of Upper Minho”; in that same year she was invited to be an assistant at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon, a position she held until 1952, the year in which she defended her doctoral thesis on “The Island of São Miguel – Geographical study”, after which she was integrated as first assistant at the same University. In this hierarchical position she was part of the Mission of Studies to Portuguese India (1956–57).
In 1957 the Capelinhos volcano occurred on the Azorean island of Faial, an event she carefully observed throughout the two periods of observation, from which was published, at the request of the magazine Naturalia, the “First report of the Capelinhos eruption on the island of Faial” (Orlando Ribeiro/Raquel Soeiro de Brito), and which has been widely disseminated through conferences, in Portugal as well as abroad, always accompanied by films and photos that she herself produced, for the most part.
In 1960 she was invited by the direction of ISCSPU as associate professor; in 1966 she defended the position of full professor with the work “Goa and the Northern Forts”, which earned the “Gago Coutinho” prize from the Lisbon Geographical Society, and, in that same year, was published by the Overseas Research Board. This was followed by 20 years of research throughout the former overseas territories, supported by extensive photographic and film documentation, work condensed in “In the Trail of the Discoveries – geographical studies”, published in 1997 by CNDP.
In 1977 she was asked, by the then Minister of Education, to join the group of professors tasked with “shaping” the New University of Lisbon, where she founded the Departments of Anthropology and of Geography and Regional Planning, the latter with a rather innovative curriculum.
Her activity continued beyond the “obligatory” period of work, which ended in 1996. At the beginning of the new millennium she was elected vice‑president of the Navy Academy, where for 15 years she collaborated enthusiastically in various tasks, with several Presidents.
In 2002, “Nordeste Alentejano em mudança” was published by Edições Inapa.
In 2005 she held a cycle of conferences at the CCB about Portugal “The Land and the People”; and the long, arduous task of preparing the voluminous “Atlas of Portugal”, published by the Portuguese Geographic Institute, of which I was responsible, was concluded, in which more than a dozen authors collaborated, many dozens of maps and graphs were produced, and countless photographs were selected.
