There have been several tourist DVD about Lisbon released by the city’s tourism office over the years, but although they all feature beautiful images of the Portuguese capital, they always seemed to lack something in the narration, adding no more than what a Flickr gallery or GoLisbon’s own photo album could offer. But a recently-released DVD has changed that, offering beautiful shots of the city (from aerial views to close-up details of landmarks) together with an insightful guide to Lisbon by one of Portugal’s biggest cultural icons. That is Fernando Pessoa who’s also widely considered to be one of Europe’s greatest poets of the 20th century, who left behind an English-language tourist guide to Lisbon when he died. It was only found and published much after his death, and although it dates from the early 20th century, it’s interesting to note just how current it remains. That’s because his description of the view of Lisbon from the river Tagus is timeless, and because a large part of the city’s attractions are its centuries-old landmarks and the emotions they can all create together.
But this DVD also starts out by showing contemporary Lisbon and goes on to present the tour suggested by Pessoa, with a narration that includes some of his poems and the text from his “What the Tourist Should See” book. That narration is available in several languages — English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German, as well as two Portuguese versions — one for Portuguese viewers, and another by a Brazilian narrator for those Brazilians who may have difficulty in understanding the accent from Portugal.
At the end of the film there is a number of extras, all interviews with some of the narrators (the Portuguese, Brazilian, Spanish, and American), plus the director and a literary advisor who’s compiled much of Pessoa’s work. They all talk about their involvement in the process of creating the film and share their personal relationships with Lisbon, as well as how Fernando Pessoa has helped them better understand the city and even themselves. Especially evocative of the Lisbon magic and the mark it can leave on visitors is the interview of the Brazilian narrator which is subtitled for those who don’t understand Portuguese.
This is therefore a film that no one from Lisbon will want to miss, and one that tourists will want to acquire as a reminder of their visit to the city.  It’s also a great way to share the city with others who haven’t yet visited.
Look for it wherever DVD are sold in the city, with the most popular and perhaps most convenient being the FNAC store in Chiado. The price is 20 euros and you can get more details here.

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It’s been a while since we brought you a Lisbon in the World post. Today we’re taking you once again to New York, pointing out the places where you can get to know a little of Portuguese culture across the Atlantic. In the previous Lisbon in New York post we highlighted the Big Apple’s Portuguese restaurants and the historical Portuguese Synagogue in the city, and had previously told you about how the borough of Queens is named after Portugal’s Catherine of Bragança.
Today we also remember Emma Lazarus (Lázaro), the poet of Portuguese Jewish background who’s best known for the sonnet “The New Colossus” engraved on the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”), and also tell you about the first non-native citizen of New York, Jan Rodrigues. His last name reveals his Portuguese background, and he was recently remembered in a New Yorker article about Governor’s Island south of Manhattan, where he arrived in 1613 on a Dutch expedition. Rodrigues lived in what was to become New York as a trader of Dutch weapons for the local Indian tribes, and later married an Indian girl.
Another historical personality of Portuguese background in New York was Benjamin Cardozo who was a famous lawyer who went on to become the Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in the early 20th century.
Moving to the present day, a special taste of Portugal can currently be found in the SoHo neighborhood, at the Kiosk design shop. It sells products found during the owners’ travels, and until mid-February of next year Portugal will be the highlighted country. This is the second time Portugal is the featured country of a New York shop in the period of a year, as last year the popular “Whole Foods” showcased Portuguese cuisine in a special “Adventures in Portugal” month.
Other recent Portuguese-related news in Manhattan was the opening of Aldea Restaurant by Portuguese-American chef George Mendes. His specialty is Iberian cuisine, after having interned at one of Spain’s best restaurants, the three-Michelin-star Martin Berasategui in San Sebastian. The name of the restaurant means “village” in Spanish, perhaps chosen instead of the Portuguese “Aldeia” to look easier for American pronunciation. Although the dishes are Portuguese and Spanish, the wine list also includes labels from France and the United States.

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Staring tomorrow, Lisbon’s annual documentary film festival will be screening close to 200 films until the 25th of the month. One of those will be the much-talked-about “Capitalism: A Love Affair” by Michael Moore, the American filmmaker known for the controversial “Fahrenheit 911″ and “Sicko.” This seventh edition of the annual festival will also show several Portuguese documentaries and the screenings will take place in two movie theaters (“São Jorge” and “Londres”) and the Curturgest center.

The festival has also scheduled retrospective screenings with several international directors, one of them being Jonas Mekas who comes from the United States to show his more recent work, “An American Film Director at Work: Martin Scorcese.” Other special presentations will be films about and from Iran, as well as a few about former Yugoslavia.
The competing films for best feature documentary are a total of 19, from Portugal and around the world.
Check the official website for complete information: www.doclisboa.org

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Francis Ford Coppola is the latest name to be announced as one of the guests of the upcoming Estoril Film Festival. The director of the “Godfather” films and “Apocalypse Now” joins other famous personalities such as David Cronenberg (“Crash,” “A History of Violence”), Juliette Binoche (star of “The English Patient” and “Chocolat”), and David Byrne among others in the Lisbon coast for the third edition of what is becoming Lisbon’s most important film festival. This year it takes place between the 5th and 14th of November, and in three years it has been able to attract major sponsorships which in turn guarantee the organization of a big-budget world-class film festival.
Coppola will present his latest work entitled “Tetro,” while competing for the Best Feature prize will be 12 films. Many others will be screened, mainly to honor directors in retrospectives. The entire programming is already available online at the official website www.estoril-filmfestival.com, and tickets (3 euros per screening) will be available starting on November 5th at selected places in Lisbon and Estoril.
For those unfamiliar with Lisbon and its coast, Estoril is found by the beach just outside the capital, and just a short train ride away. It gained a glamorous reputation during WWII and retains a faded grandeur today. Its Hotel Palácio has always attracted celebrities, including Ian Fleming, who was inspired by the Estoril Casino next door to come up with his James Bond character.

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As GoLisbon previously reported, Hollywood has a new home in Portugal, and this week it was announced that a new movie starring Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, and Penelope Cruz will be filmed around Portugal next year. Most of the scenes will be shot in Algarve, but will also move up the country to Lisbon, Porto, and Aveiro. It’s a remake of the classic “Le Mans” which starred Steve McQueen in 1971, and this time it will be directed by Wolfgang Peterson who directed 2004′s “Troy”. The scheduled dates for filming are the month of August, as the script is still being worked on at the moment. The total budget for this film is 52 million dollars and is expected to have a crew of 600.
Another production planned for Portugal is a movie starring Richard Gere playing the role of Aristides Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat who allowed over 30,000 Jews to escape the Nazis during WWII. Other productions include a vampire thriller with Kevin Bacon, a science-fiction film starring Sigouney Weaver, a western with Val Kilmer as the star, and a Larry Cohen thriller starring Ethan Hawke.

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Famous names such as Nicholas Cage, Kate Moss, and Oprah Winfrey have been reported to be fans of one of Portugal’s most famous products. If you’ve guessed Port Wine, you’re wrong. They all love CLAUS PORTO soaps, a natural, creamy, luxury soap that’s been made in the city of Porto since 1887. They’re now sold at luxury shops around the world, in a colorful Art Deco-design packaging. In Lisbon you may get them at special gift shops such as Meio da Praça which we just told you about, as well as at a couple of museum shops such as that of the Berardo Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. In Paris you may find them at the Galeries Lafayette department store, in London you may look for them at Harrods, and in New York you may see them available at Saks Fifth Avenue.
These soaps have become more popular than ever in the last couple of years since Oprah Winfrey named them one of her favorite things on her program. She was introduced to the Portuguese soaps by Lafco, a shop in New York that had been sending her products to try over time. She never really responded until one day when the shop got a call from one of her show’s producers requesting more samples of the Claus Porto soap. As soon as Oprah mentioned the product on her show, the shop’s phones started to ring off the hook, and even now, a couple of years later, they still get calls asking for “Oprah’s soap.”
In reality these soaps have been a favorite luxury item of European elites for some time, with fashion names such as Chanel having requested custom-crested versions.
The main quality of the soaps that make them so unique and special is that they’re all traditionally made, using manual milling and drying processes. They’re therefore much more expensive than the typical supermarket soap, going for as much as 15 euros.

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GoLisbon.com was the first website to bring you a report from the opening of the Berardo Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and also brought you regular updates about the Design and Fashion Museum until its recent opening in Lisbon. Now we’re bringing you a first look at the upcoming Paula Rego Museum, located just outside the Portuguese capital by the beaches of Cascais. It will open next month and will include paintings and drawings by Portugal’s most acclaimed living artist.

Paula Rego was born in Lisbon but has been living between Cascais and London since the 1970s. In the British capital she married artist Victor Willing and was appointed the first associate artist of England’s National Gallery. She’s also considered one of the best living painters in Britain, and her works can be seen in several museums around the world, from the British Museum in London to the MoMA in New York. Her most valuable work is 1994′s “Baying” which was sold by Sotheby’s last February for over one million dollars (just over 740,000 euros).

Her work has been described as “disturbing” and “surrealist,” usually depicting what are considered feminist ideas and comments on Portuguese culture and society. In Lisbon, you can see a couple of examples at the Berardo Museum and at the Modern Art Centre of the Gulbenkian Foundation, as well as in the Chiado Museum‘s current exhibition “Modern Art in Portugal – From Amadeo to Paula Rego.” In the past, there have been retrospective exhibitions of her work in Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum, Porto‘s Serralves Museum, and at the Tate Britain.

Now there will be a permanent home for much of her art, with the upcoming museum housed in a brand-new building designed by the renowned architect Eduardo Souto Moura. It features two conical towers that bring to mind the famous gigantic chimneys of Sintra‘s National Palace, while inside it will show a total of 121 works by the artist. The 750 square meters of space will also include an area for temporary exhibitions, a cafeteria, a bookshop, and an auditorium.

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One of Lisbon’s most popular viewpoints has been given a makeover and a new official name. Miradouro da Graça is a terrace in front of a church that has been a favorite hangout in the last few years thanks to its kiosk cafe that stays open until very late, and above all, its fantastic city views. One of its most famous fans was Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, a local poet who died in 2004 but who spent many of her days admiring the city from this viewpoint. To honor the writer, Lisbon has now placed her bust on the terrace looking out to the city, and renamed the site “Miradouro Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen.” Of course everyone will continue to call it “Miradouro da Graça” (or “Graça Viewpoint”), but this will now also be Sophia’s eternal home, with one of her poems dedicated to Lisbon having been placed on a wall next to her bust.

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It was announced last week that the south of Portugal (Algarve) is the likely home of a future Hollywood studio and theme park created by Universal Studios and CBS Paramount. It would be located in the city of Portimão, with the park costing 550 million euros and the studios around 200 million. The theme park would be about the history of cinema, and would be Universal’s first park in Europe, after the ones it has in Hollywood, Orlando, and Japan. The studios would be run by CBS Paramount, with a projected starting date of 2010, and would include post-production facilities and a “watertank” for the filming of underwater scenes. Portugal is an attractive country for such a project in part because of its near-perfect weather and competitive prices, as well as varied scenery.
Apparently also moving to Portugal is actress Angelina Jolie which the gossip columns have reported this week is also looking for a home in Algarve. Her chosen location seems to be Lagos, with the local media reporting a 10-million euro mansion in that seaside town as the possible future home of the actress.

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Move over Nelly Furtado — there are two other girls looking for your title of top-selling Portuguese pop artist on the international stage.
One of them is a descendant of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores just like Furtado although she was born in the United States, while the other’s birthplace was the UK with Lisbon now as a second home. They are Sarah Borges and Mia Rose.

Borges is a 30-year-old singer from Taunton, Massachusetts, who has just released an album through Sugar Hill Records called “The Stars are Out.” It has been given favorable reviews by Rolling Stone magazine and the New York Times, and has a pop-rock sound. This is actually her third album, but the first one to get the attention of the major publications. Her grandparents are all from the Azores (from the island of Terceira on the mother’s side and Faial on the father’s), and the singer claims to have grown up eating mostly Portuguese food and surrounded by Portuguese traditions. Her Portuguese roots also helped her with her college education when she received a Portuguese-American scholarship. This month she starts a nationwide tour to promote her album and has already shot a video for the first single “Do it for Free” (watch it below). She admits she’d love to be the next Nelly Furtado and would like to make it to Portugal soon.

As for Mia Rose, she’s actually already performed in Lisbon (at the Alcantara Cafe). She was born in London and became the most-subscribed musician on YouTube ever, with 3 million viewers a month. Her popularity led to articles in Rolling Stone and The Sun, and has released two singles. There’s no complete album yet, but that should only be a matter of time, as she tries to attract even more fans. You can follow her on her website miarosemusic.com

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