Synopsis

The military coup d’Etat of April 25, 1974 marked the beginning of a vast movement of the masses. One of the characteristics of this historical process was to have bought about deep social transformations without however assuring the existence of a revolutionary power. Nevertheless, all the political forces, from the left to the right, spoke in the name of the nation, as if they alone possessed the secret of the past and the future of Portugal. We have written and filmed « A Santa Aliança » as the events impregnated our fiction and our thoughts. How to talk about, through a film, a revolution which was (and which still is) for the most part, an imaginary revolution ? How to represent that almost mystical instance of the revolution in whose name is decided the class struggle. How to express the ideological confusion which crosses the country without reducing the characters to simple slogans ? « A Santa Aliança » is a film about incertainty, marked by the contradictions and the doubts of those who worked on it, in a precise historic conjuncture. But it is also, I believe, a film about « the hope of April », because now, nothing will ever be the same. Eduardo GEADA