Jaime (1974)
35mm, 35 min.
"While working at Lisbon’s famed Miguel Bombarda sanatorium,
psychologist Margarida Cordeiro discovered a series of arresting
drawings by the subject of her first film with Reis, a recently deceased
former patient and paranoid schizophrenic named Jaime Fernandes.
Keeping a deeply respectful yet never tentative distance from the asylum
world as a realm of unfathomable mystery, Reis and Cordeiro linger over
Fernandes’ remarkably expressive drawings, assembling a profoundly
moving and hypnotic portrait of a gifted artist and powerful emblem of
Portugal’s virtual imprisonment during the repressive Salazar regime." Harvard Film Archives (on view as part of The School of Reis: The Films and Legacy of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro)
