São Jorge tells the story of Jorge, an unemployed boxer, who agrees to work as a debt collector to pay off his own debts and to try to prevent his Brazilian wife and their son from emigrating back to Brazil. Nuno Lopes won the award for best actor at the Venice Film Festival. [+]
São Jorge is the new film by director Marco Martins, whose first feature film, Alice, was
shown at Festiberico 2010. This new film reunites Martins with Nuno Lopes, who received the
award for best actor at the Venice Film Festival 2017 for his performance as Jorge.
Jorge is an unemployed boxer trying desperately to find a way to support his wife,
Susana (Mariana Nunes), and son, Nelson (David Semedo). When Susana, a Brazilian immigrant,
decides to escape the financial crisis that had settled in Portugal and to return to her country,
Jorge is at his wit’s end. As a last resort he agrees to work as a debt collector.
Using his boxer body, he intimidates people who, like him, find themselves in a desperate situation.
Pressured by poverty and the lack of alternatives, Jorge finds himself crossing the border
of morality and entering a world of crime. The action takes place during the recent
economic crisis in Portugal and focuses on the years of troika intervention in the country.
The social aspect of the film emerged during the development of the project,
which initially intended only to be a boxing film that reunited the director Marco Martins with
the actor Nuno Lopes. Throughout the research for São Jorge, in which they spoke with
boxers and visited social neighborhoods, they began to understand that there was a
social side related to the crisis that needed to be told. The role that led to Nuno Lopes’ award
in Venice forced him to gain about 20 kilos and to train for six months in order to be able to better embody the character.
This film was the Portuguese submission for the 2018 Oscar in the category of Best Foreign Film.
It was the movie that received the most Sophia awards in 2018, the awards of the Portuguese film academy. [-]
