20/12/2006

This year’s Christmas holidays bring the premiere of 20,13 Purgatório, the highly anticipated new film by 49 year-old director Joaquim Leitão. The film is the second title in Leitão's trilogy on the Portuguese Colonial War, following Hell (1999) and preceding the third and final act, Paradise.

20,13 Purgatório is set in the late 1960s in a military camp in Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony that finally gained independence in 1975. What was meant to be a peaceful Christmas Eve ends badly as a group of soldiers bring back a prisoner who will be murdered. At the same time, the captain’s wife makes a surprise visit, bringing along a priest who is supposed to celebrate the Christmas mass.

The film, written by Leitão and Luís Lopes in collaboration with producer Tino Navarro (MGN Filmes), is named after a passage from the Old Testament, which openly describes homosexuality as an abomination and urges that those practising it to be put to death.

Repressed sexual impulses were at the heart of some documented cases of violence in the colonial war. "Research was done to see to what extent the subject could be verisimilar and placed in the context of the film", Leitão told the local press, and "there were indeed cases related to homosexuality, some of which are known as they have even been taken to trial".

Shot last summer in the Shooting Field of Alcochete, near Lisbon, the film was produced by Leitão's long-term producer Navarro with the support of the ICAM. Lusomundo is handling distribution of the film, which stars Marco d'Almeida, Carla Chambel, Adriano Carvalho, Ivo Canelas, along with 2007 Shooting Star Afonso Pimentel.

Leitão will now begin preparing the trilogy's third part and, hopefully, it will not take him other seven years to reach Paradise. The story, which has already been unveiled, will focus on teenage characters who spend one last Summer together before they were send to Africa.