Love, cinema and naivety. They meet randomly in the street: João is unemployed, Clara is a cinema production assistant. A boy-meets-girl story where the consummation is cinema itself. The protagonist’s world reflects that of a young generation: an inner world, melancholic, sensitive, naïve, and imaginative. A world that allows a film camera to speak.
It is said that Paulo Rocha once told Henri Langlois that Portuguese cinema could be characterised by three adjectives: anarchic, artisanal and visual. Óculos de Sol Pretos is, to a certain extent, a fable—as romantic as it is analytical—on precisely this subject. A “moral tale” about the artistic condition in Portugal, a “sardonic comedy” about the misadventures of making films in this country. A film within a film (within a film), starring the clumsiest of production assistants. Inspired by many of the anecdotes shared amongst colleagues on set, Pedro Ramalhete sketches a broad portrait of the Portuguese film scene, navigating between criticism (the toxic atmosphere, precariousness, the obsessiveness, power imbalances) and passion (with several love letters addressed to Portuguese filmmakers such as José Álvaro de Morais, Manuel Mozos or Miguel Gomes). “Cinema is a drudgery,” reads an intertitle at one point, and yet it goes on. A cinephile film, where that adjective is used as an insult. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
