Fade-out near for travelling ‘Cinema Paradiso’ in Portugal
Itinerant projectionist Antonio Feliciano has been showing films in far-flung villages since he was a boy, but time and the internet is catching up with him
Shades of Oscar-winning classic Cinema Paradiso run through the life of Antonio Feliciano, a sprightly 75-year-old who fears he may be the last of Portugal’s travelling film projectionists.
“If I’m not the last one, I’m close,” Feliciano said. “This is a legacy that is going to end. When I’m gone, travelling cinema will be mentioned in articles, but only as a memory.”
Like Toto, the boy who befriends projectionist Alfredo in the 1988 Italian hit film, Feliciano also started as a youngster, in the 1950s, helping a travelling projectionist announce the weekend’s bill on a loudspeaker in his village in rural Alentejo.
About 200km from Lisbon, hilltop Monforte is a typical Alentejo village – picturesque, but sleepy, its population reduced to 3,000 by economic woes and emigration.
“Our entertainment was the travelling cinema, we didn’t have anything else, no TV, no radio, we were very poor,” resident Nazare Alfaia, 71, said.
“I don’t know how to read, so I can’t remember the names of the films, but they were adventures, cowboys and horses,” she added, surrounded by a collection of Feliciano’s old projectors and fading posters of Westerns and musicals.
Wearing a blue work coat with the word “Cinema” printed on the back, Feliciano spends an hour setting up, at one point using a hammer to align the reel of a biopic of Amalia Rodrigues, diva of Portugal’s melancholic ’fado’ music.
“This is a ride of unpredictable emotions, never easy. The sound must be good, the image clear, the equipment protected for travel. I’m like a trapeze artist without a net,” he said.
Feliciano looks younger than his years, his conversation peppered with anecdotes about his quasi-bohemian life.
His jovial expression sours only when he laments that he cannot find anyone to carry on the tradition.
“It’s a shame that this important cultural expression is lost, that when I die there will be no one left to go from village to village to show a film.”