Antonio Reis e Margarida Cordeiro

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)