A film within a film and a film about film, Rosa Coutinho Cabral’s Cães sem Coleira/Dogs Without a Leash is a prime example of the marginality often experienced by cinema in Portugal. Not very well known, the film was released in 1997 but only screened a few times in the two decades of its existence. In addition to being relatively obscure, it is a marginal film because of its form and content. Dogs Without a Leash tells the story of António Feliciano (b. 1939), one of the most senior and most dynamic professionals of film exhibition in southern Portugal, and particularly in small villages on the coast of Alentejo. A film lover, Feliciano would try to watch, and then screen, as many films as possible in the Portugal of the New State dictatorship (1933-1974). Navigating distribution and exhibition constraints since the 1960s (including censorship in the New State years), he would bring cinema to town halls and public squares in rural Portugal, and opened his own cinema theatre, Girasol, in Vila Nova de Milfontes. Rosa Coutinho Cabral tells the story of Feliciano using fiction to reconstruct some of the most important moments in his life and career, and casting Feliciano to appear in documentary sequences in which he tells us more about himself, or directs the actors’ performances. The film begins by introducing the actors as the characters they will play, and Rosa Coutinho Cabral can be seen at different points in the narrative. Self-reflexive but always critical, the film’s gaze is on cinema in Portugal, particularly in restricted settings and remote communities. Thus addressing some of the key themes of this conference, this is a film that questions the spaces occupied by cinema, throughout the twentieth century and today, and that brings to the fore matters of language and legislation (once we discover who the ‘dogs’ in the title are), passion and nostalgia – and the way in which these concepts still inform our vision of cinema, its history and its future.

ML