Title：Veredas Year：1978 Genre：Drama / Fantasy Language：Portuguese Country：Portugal Director：João César Monteiro Writer：Esquilo / José Gomes Ferreira / João César Monteiro Actors：Manuela de Freitas / Luís de Sousa Costa / Francisco Domingues Plot：For his feature debut Monteiro creatively borrowed from traditional Portuguese legends to craft a series of echoing, parallel tales of young couples desperately escaping cruel false fathers, each couple on the run across different regions of the country and during increasingly contemporary time periods. A lyrical and profoundly cinematographic allegory with a glistening sharp political edge, Paths traces a pattern of repressive authority across Portuguese history while also pointing, with cautious optimism, towards the steady presence of youthful resistance. With its stunning choreography of landscape and use of a poetic, associative structure to evoke the longue durée of mythical time, Paths anticipates Monteiro's mid-career masterpiece Silvestre.
