Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is a history teacher in a secondary school. He is divorced, involved in a rather one-sided relationship with a bank clerk, and he is depressed. To lift his depression, a colleague suggests he rent a certain video. Tertuliano watches the film and is unimpressed. During the night, noises in his apartment wake him. He goes into the living room to find that the VCR is replaying the video, and as he watches in astonishment, he sees a man who looks exactly like him - or, more specifically, exactly like the man he was five years before, moustachioed and fuller in the face. He sleeps badly. Against his own better judgement, Tertuliano decides to pursue his double. As he establishes the man's identity, what begins as a whimsical story becomes a dark meditation on identity and, perhaps, on the crass assumptions behind cloning - that we are merely our outward appearance rather than the sum of our experiences.
This project has been funded with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.
José de Sousa Saramago(1922-2010) is a Nobel-laureate Portuguese writer, playwright and journalist. His works commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor rather than the official story. Some of his works can also be seen as allegories – among them are the novels “Blindness” and “The Elephant’s Journey”, which are published in Bulgaria. Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. More than two million copies of his books have been sold in Portugal and his work has been translated into 25 languages. He was a founding member of the National Front for the Defence of Culture in Lisbon in 1992. A proponent of libertarian communism, Saramago came into conflict with groups such as the Catholic Church. In 1992, the Portuguese government ordered the removal of “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” from the European Literary Prize's shortlist, claiming the work was religiously offensive. Disheartened by this political censorship of his novel, Saramago went into exile on a Spanish island where he resided until his death in 2010.
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