In a statement, Beta Cinema reveals that \u201cThe Man Who Stole Portugal\u201d is a production of the British company EMU Films, based on the book \u201cThe Man Who Stole Portugal\u201d by Murray Teigh Bloom, already published in Portugal, with filming planned for Portugal, the United Kingdom, and South Africa.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Man Who Stole Portugal\u201d is presented as a period heist film with dark humour, whose story moves from \u201cthe glamour and political turmoil of 1920s Lisbon to colonial Angola and the world of London printing houses.\u201d<\/p>\n
The cast<\/p>\n
The cast is headed by British actor James Nelson Joyce as Artur Alves dos Reis (1896-1955), and also includes Richard E. Grant, Dominic West, Joel Fry, Herbert Nordrum, Kim Bodnia, and Nia Towle, among others.<\/p>\n
The film \u201cwill give audiences the thrill of a great heist movie, but with a true story so scandalous it\u2019s hard to believe it actually happened. It\u2019s fun, stylish and fast-paced,\u201d said producer Michael Elliott in a press release.<\/p>\n
Who is Artur Alves dos Reis?<\/p>\n
Artur Alves dos Reis became famous for committing various frauds, notably forging 500-escudo notes, contracts, checks, signatures, and diplomas, in order to amass a fortune.<\/p>\n
He posed as an engineer in Angola, forged the signatures of Bank of Portugal administrators, and persuaded a British banknote printing house to print 200,000 500-escudo notes, which circulated illegally in Portugal and England. This money was used to found the Bank of Angola and Metropolis in 1925.<\/p>\n
\u201cFraud, forgery, and embezzlement were three crimes that Alves Reis committed to amass a fortune,\u201d states the biography available online from the Bank of Portugal, noting that the swindler was convicted in 1930 and released from prison in 1945.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring the trial, he claimed that his objective was simply to develop Angola. He died on 9 July 1955, at the age of 58, penniless, at his home in Lisbon,\u201d the Bank of Portugal states.<\/p>\n
According to the film’s executive producer, Terry Smith (of Moviedrome), Alves dos Reis was “a criminal mastermind who realised that forging a contract to print banknotes was infinitely easier than forging the banknotes themselves.”<\/p>\n
The story is also “a remarkable premonition: The shockwaves it caused in the Portuguese economy and the subsequent political collapse echo in the money issuance by central banks during the 2008\/2009 financial crisis and during the Covid-19 pandemic,” Terry Smith stated.<\/p>\n
The project for this feature film will be presented at the “Film Market,” which begins on the 12th and is one of the parallel events to the Cannes Film Festival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a statement, Beta Cinema reveals that \u201cThe Man Who Stole Portugal\u201d is a production of the British…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":576599,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-576598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576598\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}