“Adventures in Empire: a mistold story” (2024) - Dir. Rui Lopes

+ Q&A with the director

BLOC Queen Mary University of London - 10 December - 19.00h - (TBC)

https://www.qmul.ac.uk/bloc/events/items/adventures-in-empire-a-mistold-story.html

Portugal’s imperial past featured prominently both in the Salazar regime’s official propaganda and in militant cinema in solidarity with the anticolonial struggle. Yet, from the 1930s to the 1970s the Portuguese colonial empire was also brought to the screen by dozens of Hollywood crime films and European spy thrillers. In particular, Macao's sampans and casinos became a recurrent presence in popular audiovisual fiction, visualizing this colony through a touristic gaze ('The Monte Carlo of the Orient') and through orientalist discourse that emphasized vice, violence, and corruption ('The wickedest city in the world'). In Adventures in the Empire: a mistold story, historian Rui Lopes dynamically merges images and sounds from over thirty films and television episodes with press clippings, scripts, censorship files, and other documents, shedding a new light on the paradoxes and artifices that materialized the imagination of colonial Macao and projected it around the world.