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Jaime
Jaime Fernandes was a peasant born in Covilhã, in central Portugal. At 38, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and admitted to Miguel Bombarda Hospital, where he would reside until his death at the age of 69. In the last four years of his life, and due to the influence of the social and hospital environment, he produced a short but extraordinarily prolific body of pictorial works.
Filmmaker António Reis (with the help of Margarida Cordeiro, his wife, and a psychiatrist at Miguel Bombarda) portrays the life and work of this man from the artistic legacy he left behind—a fundamental work of New Portuguese Cinema.
Bio António Reis
António Reis (1927-1991) is revered in his native Portugal as a visionary artist whose films exerted an immeasurable influence over the post-Salazar rebirth of Portuguese cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. Born in Oporto, Reis found renown first as a poet before meeting the great Manoel de Oliveira, who invited Reis to be assistant director on the radical masterpiece Rite of Spring. Their pioneering mode of poetic ethnographic cinema guided the course of the four extraordinary works Reis co-directed with his wife, the psychiatrist Margarida Cordeiro (b. 1939), culminating in Trás-os-Montes, a lyrical search for the very “soul” of Portuguese cult …
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- This film was #62 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025