Screening and talk on the Portuguese film The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

December 21, 2022

On Monday, December 19, 2022, a TUFS Cinema screening of the Portuguese film The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis was held at the Agora Global Prometheus Hall.

The film is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago, whose 100th birthday is celebrated this year. The story begins when Ricardo Reis, a friend of the poet Fernando Pessoa, returns to Portugal from Brazil, where he had lived for 16 years, upon receiving news of Pessoa’s death.

After the screening, the audience heard a lecture by Kazufumi Watanabe, a doctoral student of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) who currently works at the Portuguese Embassy in Japan. In his lecture, he explained the characteristics of Portuguese literature, the differences between the original models of the characters and the film, the scenes depicted in the film, and gave some background on the history of Portugal.