Heiners Filmseiten – Morning Undersea (en)

Morning Undersea (Manhã Submersa)

German title: Versunkener Morgen
Francaise title: Les brumes de l’Aube
Spain title: Mañana sumergida
Russian title: Утренний туман
Original title: Manhã Submersa

Alternative titles:
Manha submersa / Morning mist / Misty Morning / Mañana brumosa

Youth drama – Portugal
Production year: 1978
Movie length: 127 minutes

Director: Lauro António
Writer: Lauro António, Vergilio Ferreira
Cinematograph: Elso Roque
Music: Giuseppe Verdi

Movie description:

Estefãnia is an old, rich, strict catholic woman, and when she sets her eyes on a couple of servants who have no means to bring up properly their youngest son, António, she decides to move her influences in order to make a priest out of him. The parents accept it, the local priest and even the Seminar’s rector accept it, and António accepts it – if not for piety, for abeyance to his parents. Once time goes by, and António is out of rural misery and into the prison-like system of a seminar, doubts and anguishes mount within him.

Based on an autobiography by Vergilio Ferreira that was banned during Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal (1945-1968), this compelling drama features the forced confinement of a 12-year-old boy in a seminary. When a patroness chooses to send Antonio to a seminary to be trained as a priest for the village, he has nothing to say about it. His widowed mother needs him to help her with the other children, his family is impoverished, and he has no interest in being a priest, but none of this matters. Once in the seminary, he makes friends with another boy in the same situation, and they both vow to leave within the year. Increasing misfortune awaits Antonio, but when tragedy strikes before the year is up he begins to see how he can escape for good.

Boy Actors