As Meninas Exemplares

87 Min. | PT | 2025

Language: OmeU | Original language: Portuguese, English, German

Director: João Botelho

An adaptation of the 19th-century children’s classic by the Countess of Ségur, seen through the eyes of painter Paula Rego, who found in the book a rich source for her simultaneously unsettling, provocative, and irreverent imagination. Blending cinema with Rego’s distinctive visual universe, the film explores the darker undertones beneath a seemingly innocent story of childhood, discipline, rebellion, and punishment. A surprising encounter between literature, cinema, and Paula Rego’s visual world.