Portugal, 1968. Salazar, the longest-serving fascist dictator, falls from his chair and suffers a stroke. Returning to his Palace to recover from illness, he is no longer President. No one reveals this him: neither his loyal housekeeper, nor his hard-working maids, nor his doctor.
In the final years of the fascist regime in Portugal, isolated in the Palácio de São Bento, Salazar lives in a bubble carefully constructed by a strict housekeeper and three submissive maids. A make-believe world where power is an illusion maintained at all costs. The palace, like the country at the time, is marked by the violence of small things and by relationships where lies and obedience blur together. Through hallucinations and nightmares, the film dives into the mind of a dictator in decline, revealing through his animal side a possibility of dehumanization wrought by fascism, as well as the nostalgia for an idealized rural life. The figure of the housekeeper Maria, hauntingly portrayed by Catarina Avelar, stands as a symbol of control and obedience. José Filipe Costa’s first fiction feature rescues a little-known episode, absent from school textbooks, which ends up reflecting—perhaps unintentionally—the frightening echoes of that past in the present: the illusion of order, the cult of the traditional family, fear, and authoritarianism that, then as now, insinuate themselves into everyday discourse and gestures. (Carlos Ramos)
