António da Cunha Telles is an unavoidable personality of Portuguese cinema. As a producer, he was at the origin of Portuguese New Cinema by producing Paulo Rocha's film Os Verdes Anos, Fernando Lopes film Belarmino and António de Macedo's film Domingo à Tarde. As a director he gave him a second breath with his film O Cerco. As a distributor he brought Ivan The Terrible and the Potemkin Battleship from Sergei Eisenstein. As exhibitor he showed us Deus, Pátria, Autoridade de Rui Simões of Rui Simões and The Salt of the Earth by Herbert J. Biberman. But António considers himself more a director than anything else. With a scarce and uneven filmography, his films have, however, been a reflection of the time they were made, showing that António da Cunha Telles is, above all, an attentive spectator, not only of films, but of life.
