O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis

**João Botelho** brings to the TNSJ the world premiere of ** O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis ** [ The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis ], his adaptation of José Saramago’s novel with the same title. Interweaving the threads of fiction and history, Saramago conceived a very peculiar encounter between the late Fernando Pessoa and one of his creations, the heteronym Ricardo Reis, who has returned to Portugal after 16 years exiled in Brazil. 1936 is the year of all perils, such as Mussolini’s Fascism, Hitler’s Nazism, the brutal Spanish Civil War and Salazar’s Estado Novo. “I am not a ghost”, Pessoa shouts at Reis. Indeed, the text is real and concrete, providing the material that is worked by João Botelho as he continues his recent practice of giving filmic form to major works of Portuguese literature. “Life and Death are the same”: literature and film have privileged access to this sort of fantastic realism.