A culmination of Joao Canijo’s oeuvre, the diptych Bad Living/Living Bad premiered at this year’s Berlinale—the former in the international Competition, where it won the Silver Bear Jury Prize, and the latter in the parallel Encounters competition. The films focus on a hotel from complementary angles: the story of the family running the hotel (Bad Living), and those of the guests who temporarily occupy it (Living Bad). They are pieces of the same ambitious endeavour: to portray motherly love, and how it becomes a suffocating affection. Made with his habitual entourage (Anabela Moreira, Rita Blanco, Cleia Almeida, and Vera Barreto) and an enormous ensemble of additional actors (Madalena Almeida, Nuno Lopes, Filipa Areosa, Leonor Silveira, Rafael Morais, Lia Carvalho, Beatriz Batarda, Carolina Amaral, and Leonor Vasconcelos), Canijo’s latest project is an impressive demonstration of the director’s process of cinematic creation.
To map Joao Canijo’s cinema is also to map Portugal’s cultural representations. His cinematic geography is the country’s peripheries, and his work may be understood as a sociological study of life in these places. Charting his almost four decades of filmmaking is also to understand the changes in the “Portuguese world,” which rapidly transformed from a rigid dictatorship to a free-market democracy. Whether in a small industrial city in the south or a rural village in the north, in a Parisian or a hostess bar in the middle of nowhere, in social housing on
