Manoel de Oliveira dies in Porto aged 106

Portuguese film director Manoel de Oliveira has died in Porto at the age of 106.

Believed to be the world’s oldest film-maker, Manoel de Oliveira made his first film in 1931 and continued making films up to last year.

Manoel de Oliveira made more than 50 films and competed for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival on five occasions.

Cannes Film Festival gave Manoel de Oliveira an honorary Palme for “blending aesthetic contemplation and technological innovations” in 2008.

Manoel de Oliveira’s last movie, Gebo and the Shadow, was released in 2012.

Born in 1908 in Porto in to a family of wealthy industrialists, Manoel Candido Pinto de Oliveira originally trained as an actor.

He made his directing debut in 1931 with a silent documentary short about river workers in his home city and made his first feature in 1942.

Manoel de Oliveira’s credits were sporadic under Antonio Salazar’s dictatorship. From 1981 onwards, though, he roughly directed a film a year.

His prolific work rate saw him become a regular at Europe’s leading film festivals and be embraced by cineastes, particularly in France.

The Convent (1995), one of his better-known films, starred John Malkovich as an American professor determined to prove that Shakespeare was Spanish.

John Malkovich and his co-star, Catherine Deneuve, would work with Manoel de Oliveira again on 2001’s I’m Going Home and 2003’s A Talking Picture.

The director’s other films included Belle Toujours, a 2006 follow-up to Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour.

His later work often dealt with melancholy bourgeois characters and had a stylistic formality that involved long takes and static camerawork.

Manoel de Oliveira left instructions that Memories and Confessions, a 1982 film about a house in which he used to live, only be released after his death.

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