Lusophone Film and Media

The screen — of cinema, of television and, today, of the mobile phone — is, alongside music, the medium through which the Portuguese language circulates most widely in the contemporary world. A Brazilian telenovela reaches dozens of countries; a Portuguese auteur film tours the major festivals; public broadcasters carry the language to the diaspora and across the Lusophone spaces of Africa and Asia. To speak of Lusophone film and media is thus to speak of one of the living infrastructures of the language.

Portuguese cinema

Portuguese cinema is first and foremost an auteur cinema, better known in international festivals than at the box office. Its tutelary figure is Manoel de Oliveira (1908–2015), who filmed from the silent documentary Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931) almost to the eve of his death — one of the longest careers in all of film history. His Aniki-Bóbó (1942), shot in the streets of Porto, anticipated Italian neorealism by years.

In the 1960s, the Portuguese Cinema Novo — Paulo Rocha (Os Verdes Anos, 1963), Fernando Lopes (Belarmino, 1964) — renewed the film language. From that rigour came a tradition still alive in Pedro Costa, chronicler of Lisbon’s margins (In Vanda’s Room; Horse Money), and in Miguel Gomes, whose Tabu (2012) and Grand Tour (2024, Best Director at Cannes) again carried Portuguese to the largest stages.

Brazilian cinema

In Brazil, the Cinema Novo of the 1960s was a movement of vast aesthetic and political reach, under Glauber Rocha’s motto of “a camera in the hand and an idea in the head”. Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Vidas Secas (1963) and Glauber’s Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964) are its landmarks.

After the ebb of the dictatorship, the so-called Retomada (“revival”) of the 1990s returned Brazilian cinema to the world stage: Walter Salles’s Central do Brasil (1998) won the Golden Bear in Berlin, and Fernando Meirelles’s City of God (2002) reached a planetary audience. In 2025, I’m Still Here, again by Salles, won the Academy Award for Best International Feature — the first in Brazil’s history.

Lusophone African cinemas

Decolonisation (1974–1975) gave rise to national cinemas in Africa. In Angola, Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972) depicted the liberation struggle. In Guinea-Bissau, Flora Gomes’s Mortu Nega (1988) was the country’s first fiction feature. In Mozambique, filmmakers such as Licínio Azevedo built a documentary cinema of strong social roots. These are cinemas of scarce means but distinct voice, in dialogue with the creoles and the national languages.

Television and the telenovela

If cinema lends the language prestige, it is television that spreads it en masse. The Brazilian telenovela in particular has become one of the great cultural exports of the Lusophone world, sold to more than a hundred countries and dubbed or subtitled into dozens of languages.

The arrival of the telenovela Gabriela in Portugal in 1977 had a lasting linguistic impact: it familiarised European audiences with Brazilian vocabulary, intonation and forms of address. On the institutional side, RTP (whose regular broadcasts began in 1957) runs channels such as RTP Internacional and RTP África, which link Portugal to the diaspora and to the Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa.

Country	Public broadcaster	Landmark
Portugal	RTP	Regular broadcasts since 1957
Brazil	EBC / TV Brasil	Telenovela as cultural export
Angola	TPA	Televisão Pública de Angola
Mozambique	TVM	Televisão de Moçambique

The language on screen: subtitling or dubbing

A striking cultural difference separates the two largest markets. In Portugal, the norm is subtitling: foreign films and series air in the original language, a habit often credited with part of Portuguese audiences’ familiarity with English. Brazil relies far more on dubbing, especially on free-to-air television.

From the big screen to streaming

Global platforms — and Lusophone services such as RTP Play or Globoplay — have shifted consumption to on-demand, and with it the demand for content in Portuguese has grown: Brazil is today one of the largest producers of original series for those services. The screen, in any of its formats, remains one of the places where the Portuguese language, in its many varieties, is most heard and most renewed.