Bárbara Virgínia

Who is Bárbara Virginia? a rescue of memories, a search in search of the filmmaker Bárbara Virgínia. This is a work of human and emotional archeology that brings to light the life and work of a woman who made much of the cinema culture and was forgotten ... Barbara was the first portuguese filmmaker to make feature film and the only woman to make a film in the Portuguese dictatorship and was in the competition in the first edition of of Cannes in 1946.Filmed between Portugal and Brazil, in this intimate and poetic film we accompany Searching for Barbara Virginia.

Shown in Cannes 1946, most of the film was lost and only 32 minutes of images with no sound survive today. An elementary school teacher, Lídia, is placed in an isolated village in the mountains and on the first day of school the doctor informs her that she will have to go away with the priest for three days. These will be the three godless days of the title, in which the young teacher will meet the lord of the hill, Paulo Belforte, who is feared by the whole village for allegedly setting fire to the church and for having tried to murder his own wife. Due to a series of misunderstandings, the villagers turn against Lídia and Belforte, to the point where at the end there is a torchlight procession to purify the diabolical events of Casal de Lobos. But all ends well, and peace is restored through (semi-)divine influence...

Between January 12 and 17, 1945, it snowed every day in the Lisbon region. This was an unprecedented event that has not been repeated since and that was captured in this short documentary.