A Bee in the Rain

The film is set in a Portuguese village. It moves through two people: a wealthy landowner and a widowed aristocrat. The woman lives inside a world of her own making. The account is built not on large events but on the minutiae of daily life and small intrigues. The distance between two people, and the part class plays in that distance, is the real subject. The closed order of rural Portugal is the ground of the story. The sixty six minutes are used for a short and dense telling. Laura Soveral and João Guedes take the leads, with Zita Duarte and Ruy Furtado also in the cast. Fernando Lopes’s Portuguese film was completed in 1972.