António da Cunha Telles

António Cohen da Cunha Telles was born on February 26 1935 in Funchal Madeira He studied Medicine in the University of Lisbon He went to Paris around 1956 studying filmmaking at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques IDHEC graduating in 1961 His directing debut was made with the documentary Os Transportes 1962 and starts activity as a producer becoming one of the essential names of the Portuguese New Cinema Novo Cinema movement He produces Os Verdes Anos 1963 by Paulo Rocha and Belarmino 1964 by Fernando Lopes In 1970 Cunha Telles directed his first featurefilm O Cerco Meanwhile he established a distribution company Animatógrafo which becomes responsible for a revolution in the kind of cinema seen in Portugal in the first half of the 1970s Eisenstein Tanner Jorge Sanjines Littín Glauber Rocha Vigo Gilles Carle Karmitz among others became more familiar to the Portuguese audience through that distributor