It is a film adaptation of a book of Agustina Bessa Luís

The court of the north take us to the remote island of Madeira in the late nineteenth century and the enigmatic presence of the Baroness of Madalena do Mar which is finally unraveling by her great-grandchildren, Rosamunde. This film by Joao Botelho shows the lives of several women from the same family, which are embodied by the same actress Ana Moreira. To this end, the director, uses various flashbacks that culminate with the unveiling of this mystery that runs through many generations of the Barros. The performance of Ana Moreira in this film is colossal, are five major characters, but her interpretation is not the best because you cannot discern significant differences between them, which makes the drama sequence a bit confusing. I think that the whole weight of the film fell on her back and would probably be better to distribute the roles of some of the characters by other actresses. What excited me most was the photography of Joao Ribeiro. The images are of great aesthetic beauty, thereby aggravating the tragic tendency of this film. Another curious aspect is the inherent theatricality of this film; the plans follow a dynamic that involves a large number of characters in the same framework, in the case of the scenes in the brothel, where Emilia de Sousa is the subject of the love of Joao Sanha and Gaspar de Barros and the family gatherings of Agueda and Tristan. It is a very interesting movie as a whole and one of the best film directors Joao Botelho.