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Director's Statement
Just after the war, still a child, I used to listen, in the trains teaving Campanhã station, to old blind singers, selling and singing lirics with the week's events, bloody crimes, wrong marriages, victims of poor faith, werewolfs, strange phenomena, while the train would go on up to Régua, or crossing the bridge towards Gaia, floating over the river. During the 50s, still a teenager. I got used to wander up the river, looking for characteres or places to shoot. Once, at nightfall, I was walking with my mother close to the mouth of the river Sousa when a huge "rabelo" boat went by, spreading its black sails carrying coal from the Pejão mines. The boatman, surrounded by the silence of nightfall, saw us and improvised a fourline stanza about love. After OS VERDES ANOS, the film I made in 1964, I decided to go back to my town, to my first loves. I then wrote "0 Rio do Ouro", a drama about emigrants, about broken innocence coming from the foreign money. By chance, the lost script of O RIO DO OURO, written in the 60s, came to me from inside an old box, and reading it again I fett it might be possible to pick up the Level Crossing Guard Romance, keeping the situation and the carachters of the former text: wedding, shipwreck, coal boat.