Abraham's Valley

• Leonor Silveira: Ema
• Luís Miguel Cintra: Carlos Paiva
• Ruy de Carvalho: Paulino Cardeano
• Luís Lima Barreto Pedro Lumiares
• Micheline Larpin: Simona
• Diogo Dória: Fernando Osório
• José Pinto: Caires
• Isabel Ruth: Ritinha
• Perry João Pedro Dossem
• Beatriz Batarda: Luisona ( as a girl )
• Isabel de Castro Melo - sister 1
• Laura Soveral: Aunt Augusta

On the banks of the river ( original title: Vale Abraão ) is a Portuguese- French-Swiss film director Manoel de Oliveira from the year 1993.

Action

Ema is a woman of rare beauty. She marries dispassionately the older, wealthy doctor Carlos and enters through him into a world of wealth and luxury. The men they desire, but neither her marriage nor her love affairs they can save disappointed from their illusions and their increasing loneliness.

Reception

The Cahiers du cinéma referred to in France appeared as Val Abraham film as one of the finest in the world. Again filmed Oliveira here a novel by Agustina Bessa - Luís. Your Vale Abraão 1991 was inspired by Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, on the film also occasionally refers.

The film will tell the story in poignant photograph of a beautiful and intelligent woman of her extraordinary power was aware about men, but live in a certain world of men who deny themselves a deeper meaning. Luxury, dream worlds and the game with the desire of men they do not protect them from disillusionment, and they prefer in concussive sobriety ado the consequence.

Oliveira gathered here his favorite actors (especially Leonor Silveira, Diogo Luís Miguel Cintra and Dória ) and filmed one of his favorite novel writer, who plays him in the familiar surroundings of the Douro, the river, which was already subject of his first film in 1931. At the premiere, on May 20 at the 1993 International Film Festival in Cannes, the film received ten minutes of applause.

The lexicon of the International film describes the film as a " through their directorial unity compelling, epic literature, which reflects the separation of soul and body as the origin of life pain and lifts in a religious dimension. " Addition, he called as "excellent staged [r ] and played [r ] film a confrontation with the traditional upper class arrested Portugal ".

The film won several awards, including the Tokyo International Film Festival and the International Film Festival of São Paulo.