Portuguese cinema underwent a dramatic and historically unprecedented transformation in the 1960s, led by a group of young and politically engaged firebrand filmmakers that included now- legendary figures such as Margarida Cordeiro, Fernando Lopes, António Reis, Paulo Rocha and Alberto Seixas Santos. Despite their different backgrounds and approaches, these artists shared an ardent desire to invent a new cinema, a Cinema Novo, better able to tell the authentic stories of the Portuguese people and nation in the last decade of the Salazar dictatorship, buoyed by the winds of change, and eventually revolution. The Cinema Novo movement was also driven by an embrace of documentary forms, often hybridized with fiction and inspired by specifically Portuguese folkloric narrative. A key yet often unacknowledged influence of this tendency was the work of the resolutely independent director António Campos (1922 -1999), a self-taught filmmaker and pioneer of ethnofiction who set out to capture the lives, traditions and imagination of rural Portugal in a body of work that now seems prescient in its formal rigor and poetry. Guided by his background in amateur theater and deep appreciation for literature and poetry, Campos made his early 1950s films without any government support, allowing him to forge an uncompromising vision and practice that would guide the masterworks he realized contemporary to the Cinema Novo movement and in close dialogue with its goals. This program brings together masterworks by António Campos—thanks to recent restorations by the Cinemateca Portuguesa—with key films of the Cinema Novo movement in order to explore and elucidate Campos’ deep connection to the younger generation of filmmakers while underscoring the strong documentary and docufictive strand of Cinema Novo indebted to Campos’ legacy. – Haden Guest