48

Susana de Sousa Dias examines the effects of the 48-year Portuguese dictatorship (1926-1974) through the stories of its political prisoners, upturning conventions of talking-head documentaries by layering contemporary interviews with victims over archival photographs of them taken upon their arrest. The film extends de Sousa Dias’s exploration of cinema’s relation with time by animating these official documents and pushing against boundaries of representation. A meditation on the duration of the long and tortuous years of the dictatorship, 48 questions the status of evidence and identification in official archives.

(2009, 97 min., digital video)

Presented in conjunction with the Department of Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Conference "Documenting the Archive."