António de Macedo (5 July 1931 − 5 October 2017) was a Portuguese filmmaker, writer, university professor and lecturer.
[1] He gave up filmmaking in the 1990s as he felt systematically excluded from the state support programs of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture, the only financial source for film production in Portugal in that time.
Macedo was born in Lisbon, where he graduated in architecture at the ESBAL (Escola Superior de Belas-Artes), the Faculty of Fine Arts, in 1958.
During the prime minister António de Oliveira Salazar and later of Marcello Caetano dictatorship, Macedo's movies were almost always at odds with the Portuguese censorship, specially Domingo à Tarde [Sunday Afternoon] and A Promessa [The Vow], which were seriously affected by censors.
Nojo aos Cães was selected for the Bergamo Film Festival, had good reviews and a final nomination for the first prize as well.
When asked about the reasons why his film projects were so ill-regarded by the juries, some jurors would state that the negative verdicts were consequence of a "uninteresting cinema", "detached from reality", "fanciful and too much whimsical" (See as reference the interview[2] published at the magazine of the Portuguese Authors Society).
Alongside his career of motion-picture director, Macedo has also applied himself to teaching: since 1970 until 1974 he was a teacher in "Theory and Workshops of Film Direction" at the INP Institute (Lisbon), and until 1990 he taught "Cinema Aesthetics" and "Visual Semiotics" at the IADE Institute ("College of Fine Arts and Design," in Lisbon).
This book deals with the conditions surrounding the birth, rise and fast expansion of Christianity in its early manifold currents, esoteric and exoteric, and its numberless manifestations, either official or marginal, in present times: Its author, with his discreet and accessible erudition, explains the connections between the ancient texts and their historical, philosophical and religious antecedents, as well as their connection with the Mysteries, ancient and modern.
In a dense volume of 663 pages Macedo makes a deep study of the History and Sociology of the biblical texts, discussing especially the highest importance of the esoteric and heterodox interpretations of the Bible, and respective authors and currents since the production of the ancient biblical texts until today, and the profound significance of those interpretations to the development of mentality, culture, and science of the western civilisation.