José & Pilar

Miguel Gonçalves Mendes's José & Pilar premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2010 in the Special Presentations strand, before opening commercially in Portugal in October, only weeks after the death of its central subject, José Saramago, on 18 June of that year. The Nobel-laureate novelist had granted Mendes unusually open access between 2007 and 2010, and what began as a portrait of a writer at work became, by the time of release, a quiet record of his last years. The film was produced by Mendes's own JumpCut alongside Fernando Meirelles's O2 Filmes (Brazil) and Pedro Almodóvar's El Deseo (Spain).

The structure is observational rather than expository: no voice-over, no talking-head interviews, no archive. Mendes and cinematographer Daniel Neves follow Saramago and his Spanish wife and translator Pilar del Río through airports, book tours, café conversations and the writer's island home in Lanzarote, capturing the long stretches in which The Elephant's Journey is being written. Original music comes from Adriana Calcanhotto, Camané and Noiserv, and Brazilian writers and filmmakers (among them Gael García Bernal and Meirelles himself) appear in passing as part of the couple's day-to-day.

The film was the highest-grossing Portuguese documentary of its decade and was selected as Portugal's official submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards. It remains one of the most widely seen records of Saramago in life, and is now standard viewing in Portuguese-language literature courses worldwide.