Before ‘Curtas’, I often discovered films with this group of friends that came to mark mine and our lives, first in the cinemas of Vila do Conde, Póvoa de Varzim and Porto, and then, during the 1980s, it became a regular destination in September for us to travel together with our backpacks to Figueira da Foz Film Festival. It was a place for discovering films and authors that were not seen in cinemas around here, and we attended long, passionate debates about these films, where the directors, film critics and ourselves, the audience, mixed in an unique atmosphere. There were many discoveries at that festival and Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the ones that struck me the most, a brilliant filmmaker who died of an overdose in 1982, like many music figures idolised by my generation. He had an unusual ability to make several films in a single year, with unusual means of production at the time. Discovering several of his films, such as The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant with his muse Hanna Schygulla, was inspiring for me at the time. A few years later, I saw Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a tribute film to Douglas Sirk, one of his favourite directors, adapted to 70s Germany. The way Fassbinder mixed his personal life, his passions, at a critical moment in Europe at that time, gives the film a timeliness that makes perfect sense in this year's Porto/Post/Doc programme.(Nuno Rodrigues)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with a nod to All That Heaven Allows. A lonely widow (Brigitte Mira) meets a much younger Arab worker (El Hedi ben Salem) in a bar during a rainstorm. They fall in love, to their own surprise—and to the outright shock of their families, colleagues, and drinking buddies. In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder expertly wields the emotional power of classic Hollywood melodrama to expose the racial tensions underlying contemporary German culture.