Post Criminal Case

In 2000, Susana de Sousa Dias made Criminal Case 141/53, about the sisters Isaura Borges Coelho and Hortênsia Campos Lima, who resisted a 1950s’ Portuguese law that prohibited nurses from marrying. Supported by a montage of archival material, the film told their story, which was shaped by the dictatorship under Salazar.

Now, a quarter of a century later, De Sousa Dias returns with a sequel that questions and reflects on her earlier film. She describes how she first encountered the archive material that led her to the sisters’ story in the early 1990s.

She questions the notion of documentary, of archival images, of history. How do they relate to one another? How does collective history feed individual memory, and what exactly is preserved in an archive and what is not? She emphatically searches for the gaps and silences in the archive and in her own film, and reconstructs what exactly happens when you distill a narrative from an archive.