Portugal Picks From Six Films for an Oscar Category It Has Entered 42 Times Without a Single Nomination

Portugal has submitted 42 films to the Academy Award for Best International Feature and never once been nominated, the longest run of misses of any country competing in the category. On Friday the Academia Portuguesa de Cinema (Portuguese Film Academy) named the six films from which its members will choose this year's attempt, and opened voting until 10 September.

The shortlist is: 18 Buracos para o Paraíso (18 Holes to Paradise) by João Nuno Pinto, A Memória do Cheiro das Coisas (The Memory of the Smell of Things) by António Ferreira, Maria Vitória by Mário Patrocínio, Primeira Pessoa do Plural (First Person Plural) by Sandro Aguilar, Projeto Global (Global Project) by Ivo M. Ferreira, and Terra Vil (Vile Land) by Luís Campos.

The six films

João Nuno Pinto made 18 Buracos para o Paraíso, released in June, out of what is happening to the Alentejo: property speculation, intensive agriculture and extreme drought reshaping a territory faster than the people on it can adjust. António Ferreira's A Memória do Cheiro das Coisas follows Arménio, who moves into a care home on the edge of turning 80, resents being treated like the other residents, and cannot accept help from a Black Portuguese carer.

Maria Vitória was shot in the Serra da Estrela and stars Mariana Cardoso, Miguel Borges and Miguel Nunes. A teenage girl from the interior is pushed by her father toward a future as a professional goalkeeper at a big-city club; her brother returns to the village after years of emigration and reopens old wounds, including their mother's death in a major regional fire. Sandro Aguilar's Primeira Pessoa do Plural puts Albano Jerónimo and Isabel Abreu on screen as a couple approaching their twentieth wedding anniversary.

Projeto Global has drawn the largest audience of the six, 9,200 admissions since its April release. It reconstructs the polarised Portugal of the 1980s, a democracy still being built, in which the armed group FP-25 (Popular Forces 25 April) carried out dozens of violent robberies, bombings and actions classified as terrorism that killed 17 people. Terra Vil, released in February, is Luís Campos's first fiction feature: two fractured families finding support in each other, in a community indirectly marked by the Entre-os-Rios disaster of twenty-five years ago, when the bridge to Castelo de Paiva collapsed and 59 people died.

The pre-selection committee was made up of producers Andreia Esteves and Paulo Trancoso, editor and sound designer Elsa Ferreira, actors Hoji Fortuna and Valerie Braddell, make-up artist Íris Peleira, director Paolo Marinou-Blanco and visual effects supervisor Ricardo Ferreira. The Academy said its composition reflected a commitment to representing different areas of film creation and production.

A small industry aiming at a category that has changed

The odds are structurally poor: roughly ninety countries submit, five are nominated. But the category has opened up, because the Academy's international membership has grown sharply and the shortlist now runs through a wider voting pool. Films from countries with no previous nomination have broken through in recent years on festival momentum and distributor campaigns rather than national reputation. Portugal has been close to the ceremony before without being in it: the country stayed up for a night of historic firsts in March, none of them its own.

That is exactly where Portugal's weakness sits. A campaign for this category costs money in screenings, travel and publicity, and it runs for months in Los Angeles. Portuguese producers rarely have that budget, and state support is aimed at production rather than promotion. The overhauled €200 million film incentive announced this month is designed to pull foreign productions into shooting here, a different objective from carrying a Portuguese film through an awards season.

The titles say something about where Portuguese cinema is pointing. Four are set in the interior or in territories marked by depopulation, fire, emigration and disaster. That is not a quirk of programming; it is the material the country's directors are working with, and it sits closer to the daily news than to art-house abstraction.

What This Means for Expats

• Where to watch: All six had Portuguese theatrical releases this year, and several will return to screens during the voting window. Independent cinemas in Lisbon and Porto typically programme the shortlist, the same circuit carrying the Michael Haneke retrospective now touring six Portuguese cities.
• Subtitles: Portuguese films screen here without English subtitles far more often than foreign films do. Check the listing before booking; festival screenings are the more reliable option.
• A way into the country: If you want to understand rural Portugal rather than the coastal version most newcomers see, this list is a better guide than most.
• The date: Academy members vote until 10 September, and Portugal's single entry will be announced after that.