ANXIETY

I was never much of a fan of composite films, made up of several different, unconnected stories. It all started with a secret desire to adapt for the screen a strange play by Helder Prista Monteiro called The Immortals. But I soon realized that the result would be much too short. It was then that I remembered two tales that I had been longing to adapt and which I had not done because they were too short. It so happened that Antonio Patricio' s story "Suzy" began in a theater, and that suggested the notion that all three tales could be connected so that they would form a single entity. And so it happened that "Suzy" became the central element of a triptych involving The Immortals and "The Mother of the River" by Augustina Bessa-Luis, the last being told in flash-back. I gave this triptych the title Anxiety because it occurred to me that there was cause for anxiety, to a greater or lesser degree, in each". Manoel de Oliveira, Port, May 1998