More than just a documentary, this film is a poetic and fictional essay that gathers actors, friends, and testimonies to revisit Natália Correia (1923-1993), a pivotal figure of free thought and creation in Portugal, both before and after April 25, as stated by the producers in a release.
This “journey through the multiple facets of Natália Correia,” from poet to columnist, playwright, editor, feminist, politician, and provocateur, is built from the vast archive of the author and places “where her absence still echoes.”
In this film, Rosa Coutinho seeks not merely to reconstruct a memory but to rediscover a woman driven by freedom, deeply connected to her “Azorean identity” and a radical idea of poetry as a political gesture, they add.
“Intensifying semantic relationships between levels of the piece, the film, and materials from the extensive archive of Natália Correia: photographs, press, columns, theater, essayistic and poetic work… What interested me was to suspend the interval between image-portraits, sound-portraits, poem-portraits, and distill a ‘persona dramatis’ that death does not overcome: remains forever among us,” stated the director.
Amidst actor castings, archival materials, poems, and testimonies, “A Mulher que Morreu de Pé” attempts not to confine Natália Correia to a fixed narrative but rather to let her live in all her complexity.
Featuring actors like Lídia Franco, Soraia Chaves, Joana Seixas, and João Cabral, the documentary premiered at the last edition of Olhares do Mediterrâneo and has since been showcased at several festivals, such as Porto Femme 2025, where it won the award for Best Documentary in the National Competition.
The cast also includes Alexandra Sargento, Carolina Bettencourt, Hugo Mestre Amaro, João Araújo, Leonor Cabral, Leonor Coutinho Cabral, Maria Galhardo, Mariana Pacheco de Medeiros, Milagres Paz, Paula Guedes, Ângela de Almeida, Fernando Dacosta, Carlos Melo Bento, Victor Meireles, Sérgia Farrajota, and Luís Alves de Sousa.
This fictional documentary, presented as a “poetic casting,” navigates between themes and materials, “poetically operating a documentary machine as an emotional flow, a train without a set course, with a passenger who jumps off whenever she feels like,” explains Rosa Coutinho Cabral.
In the words of the director, “it is the origin of these jumps and the escape from the domesticated direction of the world” that she aims to highlight in Natália, “the lifelong poet and antifascist, driven by freedom against any form of oppression.”
