Deposited in full at the Serralves Foundation since 2016, the Manoel de Oliveira Collection combines a vast set of documentation, consisting of various working materials - such as scripts, photographs, texts, preparatory drawings and props, among other items - as well as prizes, posters, correspondence and the director’s entire personal library. The collection is a precious instrument to further our knowledge of his work, as well as the history of cinema, art and culture in Portugal in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The selection of documents presented herein, conceived in conjunction with the temporary exhibition Manoel de Oliveira: The House, proposes a journey through the filmmaker’s archive, built up over more than eighty years, while focusing on some of his unmade projects. Starting from a list - in which the filmmaker lists his rejected funding requests, specifically in the period between 1952 and 1963 - the exhibition enables us to foresee the scale that Manoel de Oliveira's oeuvre could have attained, in a different political context and with more favourable production conditions. But whereas his oeuvre - the most extensive body of work in the history of Portuguese cinema - experienced numerous setbacks and interruptions, especially during the Estado Novo regime, it is also certain that many of his abandoned projects inspired or were reintegrated into, in part or in full, other films that he directed. This exhibition provides clues to Manoel de Oliveira's working processes and personal obsessions, complemented by the presentation of two documentaries: Manoel de Oliveira (1981), produced by Augusto M. Seabra and José Nascimento for RTP’s "Ecran” programme; and Conversazione a Porto: Manoel de Oliveira e Agustina Bessa-Luís (2005), by Daniele Segre. Above all, the exhibition highlights the determination and persistence with which this oeuvre was built.