In 2000, Susana de Sousa Dias made Criminal Case 141/53, telling the story of two nurses imprisoned during Portugal’s 48-year dictatorship for resisting a law prohibiting nurses from marrying. Twenty-five years later, the filmmaker returns to the film itself, questioning the ways in which she worked with archival materials. Post Criminal Case takes this questioning of archival practices as its starting point, extending it to the very notions of history, image and testimony.
Country
PortugalYear
2025Length
48'
Category
Video essayScreenplay
Susana de Sousa DiasCinematography
ArchivesEditing
Susana de Sousa DiasMusic
António de Sousa DiasSound
ArchivesProduction
KintopDistribution
KintopSynopsis
Biography
Susana de Sousa Dias is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores an expanded concept of the archive as a lived field where images, bodies and spaces continue to have an impact in the present. Her work has been widely screened at international film festivals and art institutions, such as the Berlinale, MoMA and documenta. In 2025, she was IDFA’s Guest of Honour.
Statement
Working in the archives shatters our certainties, disrupts established orders and narratives, and confronts us with our own memories. The archive is a place where the present itself begins to falter. Yet the film I eventually made contradicted much of what I had experienced there. Post Criminal Case returns to this contradiction. In this film, my previous works themselves become archival material. Reusing them becomes a way of tracing a process of questioning and transformation: the choices, failures and shifts through which my cinematic praxis gradually took shape.
— Susana de Sousa Dias
Archival materials
Centro de Audiovisuais do Exército (CAVE)
Arquivo PIDE/DGS-Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
RTP (Rádio e Televisão Portuguesa)
The filmmaker’s personal archive, including materials from previous films and research.
Extra
