Painéis do Porto, dir. António Reis, César Guerra Leal, Portugal 1963, 16 min., Portuguese with English subtitles 

Commissioned by the city council, Reis’s first film is an urban symphony to Porto’s hustle and bustle that tracks local workers’ movements across the city. From these images of everyday life, more abstract motifs emerge – linked to nature, buildings and colours – that herald the visual experimentation which defines Reis’s subsequent films. 

Do Céu ao Rio, dirs. César Guerra Leal & António Reis, Portugal 1964, 17 min., Portuguese with English subtitles 

Another commissioned film, Do Ceú ao Rio follows the construction of several dams in north-west Portugal by a national electricity company. While laudatory of both the projects’ technical complexity and their impact on the lives of the region’s inhabitants, the film also serves as an unexpected counterpoint to the considerations of rurality and the relationship between humans and the natural world in Reis and Cordeiro’s later work. 

Jaime, dir. António Reis, Portugal 1974, 35 min., Portuguese with English subtitles 

The beginning of Reis’s collaboration with Cordeiro, assistant director on this short, Jaime explores the life and work of Jaime Fernandes, a rural worker hospitalised with paranoid schizophrenia. In the final years of his life, Fernandes started painting and drawing relentlessly – and one of his hundreds of sketches was discovered after his death by Cordeiro, then a psychiatrist at the same hospital. Starting with Fernandes’s drawings and writings, Reis shoots in the sites where Fernandes was born, lived and died. But rather than create a linear biography of a man he never knew, Reis uses the materials available to summon up a new world.