The publication edited on the occasion of the exhibition organized as part of the state visit of His Excellency the President of the Portuguese Republic, Prof. Dr. Aníbal Cavaco Silva, to the Federal Republic of Germany, at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, from 3rd to 29th March 2009.

This book made known the filmic work of Manoel de Oliveira, in the year the master completed 100 years of life, a happy coincidence with an international exhibition the universal recognition of an author's language in cinema as an ethical example of an artist who knew how to resist to dominant tastes.

It brings together texts by João Fernandes, João Bénard da Costa and a conversation between them and Manoel de Oliveira, and refers retrospectively to the master's work with images from the most iconic films.

In 2019, the Serralves Foundation inaugurated the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira, as a new center of reference in the field of cinema and moving images, bringing together the filmmaker's extraordinary documentary nuclei.

Manoel Cândido Pinto de Oliveira was born on December 11, 1908, in Porto. He was the director with the longest career in the history of cinema, in a total of 84 years between his debut as a director (with Douro, Faina Fluvial, in 1931) and his last film (Um Século de Energia, in 2015).

With a filmography that includes more than fifty titles, he was the only filmmaker to move from silent cinema to sound cinema, from black and white to color and from nitrate film to digital support. Having continued to film until the age of 106, Manoel de Oliveira received wide critical recognition, with a work that was awarded at the most important film festivals in the world.