António Campos is one of the most unique filmmakers in last century’s Portuguese cinema. Self-taught, he began his artistic career as an amateur, with an 8mm film camera and the collaboration of a non-professional theater company from Leiria, his hometown. His first prominent movies were fictional (“The Treasure” and “The Lord”, 1958-1959), and with them he would win important awards in amateur film festivals, such as Carcassone. However, the documentary films he would start shooting in the early 1960s, such as “Leiria 1960” (1960) and “The Tuna Trap” (1961), would be the ones to earn him the epithet of precursor of visual anthropology in Portugal, or father of the Portuguese ethnographic cinema.

Contrary to what he might have expected, moving to Lisbon, and to the Gulbenkian Foundation, where he worked as a film technician, did not allow him to enter Portugal’s professional film ecosystem. He would continue his filmmaking career in a marginal position, namely with “Vilarinho das Furnas” (1971), a movie about the disappearance of a community caused by the construction of a dam; “People from Praia de Vieira” (1976), about a fishing community experiencing critical socio-economic and cultural transformations; or “Painted Walls of The Portuguese Revolution” (1976), a short film about the Lisbon walls that became means of celebration for revolutionary images and slogans.

In the final stage of his career, he would return to fiction and to a more mystical or fantastic approach, with works such as “Wild Stories” (1978), “Ti Miséria” (1979), or “A Tremonha de Cristal” (1993). In 1997, two years before his passing, Campos expressed himself “uncomfortable with a cinema where the figure of the producer rules, and strongly averse to an organization that might upset his freedom”. Throughout his artistic career, he looked above all for a film approach that allowed him “another, more fearless, cinema, an anticinema”.