Torre Bela (1975)

Torre Bela, the former estate of the Duke of Lafões, is a two-thousand-hectare farm in the Ribatejo and Portugal’s largest walled estate. It is occupied by agricultural workers with neither work nor land, who, during one of the heated moments of the PREC, decide to organize themselves as a cooperative. With the support of idealistic revolutionaries, a charismatic leader and “soldiers of the people,” they want to make their voices and arguments heard. Everyone sees this appropriation as a legitimate means of social rehabilitation, which includes helping workers who are alcoholics recover. They act in good faith and feel that they are contributing their experience to the ongoing revolutionary process. At stake is land that has lain uncultivated since 1961, which the occupants, residents of the villages of Manique do Intendente, Maçussa (Azambuja) and Lapa (Cartaxo), intend to cultivate in order to produce basic foodstuffs. The process is followed step by step in a film that invents itself step by step, seeking to decipher the deeper meaning of a gesture that goes beyond the social and brings other characters into view, besides those initially in focus: “the grassroots.” The generous soldiers of the “Military Police, within the framework of the gains safeguarded by the Armed Forces Movement (MFA)” (quoted from José de Matos-Cruz, in *O Cais do Olhar*, published by the Portuguese Cinematheque, 1999).