Over the last few decades, the practices of persecution, coercion, imprisonment and torture during the Estado Novo regime have been the subject of different academic studies as well as literary, cinematographic and television works. With the series A BEM DA NAÇÃO I intend, as an animation film author, to contribute to the construction of this collective memory.

I am above all interested in exploring the hidden and often obscure face of these practices and transforming them into a set of plastic universes that allow underlining the nature and contours of the suffering inflicted, highlighting the acts of courage and overcoming of those who were victims of persecution during this very dark period.

In the case of actions that took place in the shadow of bureaucratic artifices and suspected legality, it is especially challenging to recreate them using the expressiveness and richness of the plastic universes that animation cinema makes possible, encouraging real stories by resorting to allegories.

This will be a 6-episode mini-series of 10 minutes duration and each episode will tell a fictional story, but inspired by real life stories. People who lived, witnessed or were in some way affected by those practices of persecution, imprisonment and torture.

Each episode features a type of torture and its ballast. The narration is always bipartite, relating an interior space, the prison, with an exterior space. The narrative takes place from a female point of view.

There is always a woman who tells the story, having been a victim of coercion, imprisonment or torture or “just” a witness to violent acts inflicted on third parties, as a reporter of experiences lived by family members and friends.

In each of the six episodes, a story is built focused on a character, a type of torture and its consequences.

They are small “big” stories that deal with the feeling of loss of human dignity, moments of resistance and giving up, of denouncing and crying, of shorter passages through isolation to long periods of seclusion, and the indelible mark of what was endured.

I recognise that, nowadays, there is already a vast written work, with reports on the tortures inflicted. But, despite the testimonies, blank, silenced spaces remain. With this project, I intend to embody the unspeakable and I feel that animation cinema is the right territory to give another dimension to these experiences, resorting to visual allegories that animation techniques so well allow, feigning the constraints of reality in order to be able to overcome -them into a surreal and somewhat ghostly field, closer to the sensations described by the victims, who often gave way to hallucinations and states of mental and physical illness, caused by discouragement.

In each episode, a different animation technique is used, specifically chosen to highlight the characteristics of the narrated moment, allowing to enhance the surreal and deforming character of that experience: through pixilation we build visual metaphors about the destruction of the body; drawing with line and line allows us to talk about the depersonalisation of the individual, the use

of objects in stop-motion will allow us to convey the violence of the beatings and the inkblot will symbolize the body, the way it dismembers and deforms, how it dyes or swells when subjected to the physical abuse of torture.

Each episode will have a specific stage of experience: from Tarrafal prison, to Aljube, to Caxias and to the PIDE Portuguese Political Police) headquarters on Rua António Maria Cardoso.