The release of the historical film Sefarad in 2019 successfully initiated an ambitious cinematic plan by the Jewish Community of Porto to chronicle Portuguese Jewish history.

This strategy has transformed this European community into a global benchmark for historical dissemination through film.

Following the high-budget release of Sefarad, which detailed the modern revival of the community and the story of Captain Barros Basto, the community steadily expanded its production pipeline:

1618 film (2021) detailed the horrors and resistance during the Inquisition in Porto. It went on to become the most internationally awarded film in Portuguese cinema history.

1506 film (2024) showed the brutal Lisbon Easter pogrom where over 3,000 New Christians were massacred.

The 2,000 Kidnapped Jewish Children (2025), a harrowing documentary co-produced with the Fundacion HispanoJudia, covered the 1493 tragedy where Spanish Jewish children were stolen and exiled to the island of São Tomé.

The portfolio includes The Nun's Kaddish and The Light of Judah, all covering centuries of local Jewish lineage.

The beginning of film projects

When the Jewish Community of Porto produced a film about its centennial history in 2018, few understood its objective. If it wasn't simply to get the film into cinemas for commercial purposes, something deeper must have been at stake. And indeed it was.

The Jewish Community of Porto is an institution that aims to promote the Jewish religion and Jewish culture and history. The film's production served precisely the purpose of promoting culture and history.

Sefarad aimed to apply the Community's financial resources within the Jewish world, preventing the State or third parties from one day appearing with the desire to steal the institution's savings. The film's production involved a considerable financial investment in a cultural product that will be timeless.

The film also aimed to tell the story of the association called the Jewish Community of Porto, founded in 1923, without embellishment. Until then, and for decades, historians and naive individuals associated the Community with non-Jews of Portuguese names, in a deliberate and invented confusion.

By showing the various phases of the founding of the Community and the construction of the synagogue, the intention was to honor the meritorious Jews who then lived in Porto – Menassé Ben Dov, Srul Finkelstein, Emil Oppeneim, and others, as well as the actions of benefactors of the time, such as Lord Lawrence Kadoorie, son of Laura Mocatta, and her husband Sir Eli Kadoorie.

In addition, the film aimed to show how the Portuguese Dreyfus was persecuted and judged, based on anonymous letters from the scum of society, a fact that the State exploited to destroy him and the community he founded.

The intention with the creation of this film was to ensure that the State would never again dare to take advantage of the dregs of society to insult the leaders of the Jewish Community of Porto.

The film aimed to show the chain of events and legal actions, presided over by the granddaughter of the wronged officer, that led the Portuguese state to recognize in 2012 that he had been a victim of state antisemitism in 1934-1937.

On the other hand, Sefarad aimed to show that Barros Basto's desire to rescue the Marranos, who essentially lived in the villages, was unsuccessful, and that he himself recognized this failure in 1941.

The film showed that Marranism was a religion of its own – a mixture of Christianity and Judaism, whose practitioners had no known genealogy, and therefore needed to be officially converted to Judaism, something that never happened, despite the efforts of the captain and a prominent member of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation of London, Paul Goodman, who is also one of the characters in the film.

Finally, the film presents a true chronology of the initial plans for the founding of the community, the construction of the synagogue, the works, the inauguration, the captain's trial, the arrival and departure of refugees from World War II, the demise of the institution, decades of silence, near abandonment, and the renewed vigor and Jewish life in the 21st century.