João Canijo

Director

December 10, 1957 (68 years)

† January 29, 2026

Porto, Portugal

Biography

João Canijo (born 10 December, 1957; Porto) is a Portuguese filmmaker. His film Get a Life was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. His 2011 film Blood of My Blood was selected as the Portuguese entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards, but it did not make the final shortlist. His 2023 film Bad Living won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival. Before his directorial debut, Canijo worked as ass…

Filmography

10.0

Sai da Minha Vida

No description available

6.5

The Rose King

A mentally unstable woman and her son move to a sprawling mansion in Portugal to grow roses.

7.0

Alentejo Sem Lei

Set in Alentejo in the mid-19th century, in the period following the Liberal Wars. In a sparsely populated and almost wild land, without shadow and without law, violence dictates the existence of Bando do Zarolho.

6.5

Hotel do Rio

No description available

N/A

Caminhos da Alma - Fátima

The pilgramage of 11 women in 9 days and 400km to Fátima.

6.4

The State of Things

On location in Portugal, a film crew runs out of film while making their own version of Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended (1956). The producer is nowhere to be found and director Munro attempts to find him in hopes of being able to finish the film.

6.4

Lusitanian Illusion

Images and sounds expose the duality of Portugal during the days of WW2: a peaceful, god-loving, rural country, providing an escape route for over one hundred thousand European refugees to the Americas; and a political and cultural elite that disguised their Nazi inclinations just enough to play its neutral role in international politics.

8.5

Bad Living

In a family-run hotel near the northern coast of Portugal, several women from the same family, spanning different generations, live together. Their relationship, poisoned by bitterness, struggles to survive in the decaying hotel. The unexpected arrival of a granddaughter in this claustrophobic space provokes turmoil and rekindles latent hatreds and accumulated resentments.

7.1

Blood of My Blood

A regular family living in the outskirts of Lisbon sees the serenity of their lives shaken beyond any remedy within a week.

5.9

In the Darkness of the Night

A disturbing film about the Portuguese underworld of prostitution.

7.0

In the White City

Fed up with the sea, Paul, a Swiss mechanic working in the noisy bowels of a merchant ship, lands in Lisbon.

7.3

The Satin Slipper

During the century of the Spanish Gold, Doña Prouhèze, wife of a nobleman, deeply loves Don Rodrigo, who is forced to leave Spain and go to America. Meanwhile Prouhèze is sent to Africa to rule the city of Mogador. Ten years later Rodrigo leaves America and travels to Africa in search of Prouhèze to find out that she died and eventually meeting her daughter.

5.6

Living Bad

A hotel by the northern shore of Portugal welcomes its guests over the weekend. A man is torn between being present for his wife and the space that his mother takes up between the two of them. A mother encourages her daughter’s marriage to enable her own love affair with her son-in-law. Another mother lives through her daughter, preventing her from making her own decisions. Three families at the end of their cycles of acceptance.

7.1

Lovely Child

Maria is a sweet child. She hasn’t father and doesn’t like her mother. She has a boyfriend, A bandit who would like to change his class.

6.0

The Mountains of the Moon

This visually striking drama is taken from the classic Japanese novel Tales Of Genji by Marasaki Shikibu. Set in modern Portugal, Joao (Luis Miguel Cintra) is a left-wing political leader and ladies man with a bright future. His ex-wife Isabel (Manuela de Freitas) both loves and hates him as Joao plays on her wavering emotional state. He is sent to Italy to retrieve wayward family member Antonia (Caroline Chaniolleau), the beautiful young woman with a terrorist boyfriend. Joao is forced to recognize his feelings as the political and amorous climate changes around him.

N/A

Guia de Portugal

No description available

5.1

Black Shoes

In today's Alentejo, a story of love and death based in a real criminal case.

7.3

Get a Life

During one winter night, a Portuguese teenager, Alvaro, loses his life in a fight between a youth gang and the cops in a suburb of Paris. Cidalia, a 36 year old cleaning woman, his mother, decides to defy the code of silence of the Portuguese community and tries to find the truth. She losses her friends, her job and her family but gains a life.

5.9

Fátima

The journey of 11 women while they go on a pilgrimage from Bragança to Fatima.

4.0

The Actor's Work

Throughout a year's work, a group of ten actors and a film director will work together on the creation of the characters and on the structure of the plot of a new film to come. Long sessions of discussion, rehearsals and endless repetitions serve to develop the most important scenes of that plot until it takes its ultimate form, in the film which results from this work.