Little known in the US, António Reis (1927-1991) is revered in his native Portugal as a visionary artist whose films and many years as a beloved teacher and mentor exerted an immeasurable influence over the post-Salazar rebirth of Portuguese cinema and the new generation of filmmakers that emerged... in the 1980s and 1990s. Born in Oporto, Reis found renown first as a poet before meeting the great Manoel de Oliveira who invited Reis to be assistant director on Oliveira’s first radical masterpiece, Rite of Spring, working alongside another important collaborator, Paulo Rocha. The pioneering mode of poetic ethnographic cinema which Oliveira and Reis definedguided the course of the four extraordinary works Reis co-directed with his wife, the psychologist Margarida Cordeiro (b. 1939), culminating in Trás-os-Montes, a lyrical search for the very “soul” of Portuguese culture and history in the myths and peasant folklore embodied in Portugal’s remote far-north region.