10 Best Portuguese Movies to Watch First

10 Essential Portuguese Films

Ranked native cinema in Portugal’s own creative voice.

1. 

   1. A Canção de Lisboa

   1933

   A carefree Lisbon medical student who has lied to his wealthy aunts about graduating juggles his bohemian life, mounting debts, and two women, in Portugal's first sound film. A charming musical comedy.

2. 

   2. Abraham's Valley

   Vale Abraão · 1993

   A strikingly beautiful young woman is married off to a doctor she does not love and drifts through a life of stifled desire and quiet rebellion in the Douro valley, a modern echo of Madame Bovary. Manoel de Oliveira's stately, literary epic.

   Why & details

   Curator’s note: Manoel de Oliveira's Portuguese-language adaptation of Agustina Bessa-Luís.

3. 

   3. Tabu

   2012

   In modern Lisbon, a pious woman watches over her tempestuous, gambling-addicted elderly neighbor — and after the old woman's death, a long-buried tale emerges of her youthful, forbidden love affair on a colonial African plantation. Miguel Gomes's beguiling, black-and-white reverie.

   Why & details

   Curator’s note: Miguel Gomes's Portuguese film linking Lisbon memory and Portuguese colonial history.

4. 

   4. Aniki-Bóbó

   1942

   In the streets and along the river of Porto, a shy boy and a bolder rival vie for the affection of a little girl, in a tender, poetic story of childhood. Manoel de Oliveira's landmark early feature.

   Why & details

   Curator’s note: Manoel de Oliveira's Portuguese childhood drama and a foundational work of Portuguese cinema.

5. 

   5. Horse Money

   Cavalo Dinheiro · 2014

   In a hallucinatory limbo of hospital corridors and memory, an aging Cape Verdean immigrant in Lisbon wanders through the traumas of his life and the revolution that shaped it. Pedro Costa's haunting, painterly drama.

   Why & details

   Curator’s note: Pedro Costa's Portuguese film centered on Cape Verdean immigrant memory in Lisbon.

6. 

   6. April Captains

   Capitães de Abril · 2000

   This drama recounts the 1974 Carnation Revolution that toppled Portugal's long dictatorship, seen through two young army captains who help lead the near-bloodless coup and the euphoric day that changed the nation. A stirring historical film.

7. 

   7. Grand Tour

   2024

   In 1917, a British diplomat in Burma panics on the eve of his wedding and flees, sending his determined fiancée on a winding chase after him across Asia. Miguel Gomes's dreamlike, genre-blurring travelogue.

8. 

   8. Vitalina Varela

   2019

   A Cape Verdean woman arrives in Lisbon just days after her estranged husband's funeral, and moves through the shadows of the immigrant quarter piecing together the secret life he led without her. Pedro Costa's stunningly composed, grief-soaked drama.

   Why & details

   Curator’s note: A Cape Verdean woman navigates her way through Lisbon, following the scanty physical traces her deceased husband left behind and discovering his secret, illicit life.

9. 

   9. Letters from War

   Cartas da Guerra · 2016

   Drafted as an army doctor to the brutal front of Portugal's colonial war in Angola in 1971, a young man pours his longing, horror, and love into letters home to his pregnant wife. A lyrical, black-and-white wartime drama drawn from real letters.

10. 

    10. Fintar o Destino

    1997

    At fifty, a former footballer running a small grocery in Cape Verde feels his youthful dreams slipping away beneath the weight of routine, until a chance stirs him to chase the ambition he long ago abandoned. A wistful drama about second chances.