January 11 - February 28, 2026 João César Monteiro: An American Cinematheque Retrospective Series | HOVERING OVER WATER, RECOLLECTIONS OF THE YELLOW HOUSE, GOD’S COMEDY, GOD’S WEDDING, SILVESTRE, THE LAST DIVE, “He Who Awaits Dead Men’s Shoes Dies Barefoot,” WHAT SHALL I DO WITH THIS SWORD?, “Sophia De Mello Breyer Andresen,” SNOW WHITE, TRAILS, THE HIPS OF J.W., COME AND GO
ABOUT THE SERIES: Libertine, anarchist, cinephile—the American Cinematheque honors the work of Portuguese filmmaker João César Monteiro with a series of all-new restorations. His filmography brims with dark fables and deconstructed myths, as in SILVESTRE and WHAT SHALL I DO WITH THIS SWORD?, alongside lush, painterly explorations of desire, like TRAILS and THE LAST DIVE, in addition to those that find new frissons by entwining the two modes, like THE HIPS OF J.W. and his notorious 2000 “adaptation” of SNOW WHITE. An outspoken critic of the Estado Novo regime, Monteiro trained in London before returning to Portugal and directing “Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen,” a short documentary following the radical Portuguese poet at work. Across the next four decades, strident antifascism would persist throughout Monteiro’s films, as would his uniquely surreal poeticism. His first fiction piece, “He Who Awaits Dead Men’s Shoes Dies Barefoot,” established him as one of the leading voices of Cinema Novo. Our retrospective begins with a 40th Anniversary screening of Monteiro’s ethereal masterpiece HOVERING OVER THE WATER. By turns confrontational and dreamlike, the film stars Laura Morante as an Italian widow living on the southern coast of Portugal. Haunted by the memory of her husband, and with the country on edge following the killing of Issam Sartawi, the routine of her life is broken when she finds an injured man on a lifeboat and the two fall in love. Monteiro put himself in front of the camera in a triptych of films—RECOLLECTIONS OF THE YELLOW HOUSE, GOD’S COMEDY and GOD’S WEDDING—as his gadfly alter-ego João de Deus. An avant-garde manifestation of the trickster archetype, his (often depraved) antics reveal the hypocrisies and fascistic tendencies of bourgeois society. Our retrospective will conclude with Monteiro’s final film, COME AND GO, a poignant meditation on mortality. Join us at the Egyptian Theatre and Los Feliz 3 to experience these newly-restored, under-seen classics of Portuguese cinema.