Owners of Portugal is a documentary about one hundred years of economic power. The film portrays the State protection to families that dominated the country's economy, their strategies for power and wealth accumulation. Mello, Champalimaud, Espírito Santo - big families intersect by marriage and integrate by finance. Threatened by the end of the dictatorship, their power is restored under democracy, through privatization and promiscuity with politics. New economic groups - Amorim, Sonae, Jerónimo Martins - grow on the same basis. As the crisis unravels the limits of Portuguese economic development model, this film presents the actors and the main choices that brought us here.
Images and sounds expose the duality of Portugal during the days of WW2: a peaceful, god-loving, rural country, providing an escape route for over one hundred thousand European refugees to the Americas; and a political and cultural elite that disguised their Nazi inclinations just enough to play its neutral role in international politics.
Américo de Deus Rodrigues Tomás was a Portuguese Navy officer and politician who served as the 13th President of Portugal from 1958 to 1974.
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