Lisbon and World War II — Spies, Gold and Diplomacy

11 AM LOS ANGELES • 2 PM NEW YORK

Portugal managed to get through all of World War II without firing a single shot. Caught in a vise between the Axis and the Allies, António Salazar, the country’s strongman, used every trick in the book to get his country through unscathed. Bruno Lorvão‘s documentary Lisbon and World War II: Spies, Gold and Diplomacy explores how the Portuguese dictator took advantage his country’s neutrality, and how the rescue action of Aristides de Sousa Mendes presented a threat to Salazar’s plans.

xxxxx

THE SCHEDULE

⇒ September 25-28, watch the film Lisbon and World War II: Spies, Gold and Diplomacy on your home device. A link will be provided to all who register.

⇒ Sunday, September 27 at 2:00 p.m. US Eastern Time, tune into the program with our distinguished panel of speakers. A link will be provided to all who register.

xxxxx

MEET THE SPEAKERS

Bruno Lorvão is a documentary filmmaker and video producer based in Paris, with family roots in Portugal. His body of work focusses on political history, social movements and the memory of forgotten peoples. He produced  Lisbon and World War II: Spies, Gold and Diplomacy — on Salazar’s dangerous game of neutrality during the Second World War, when Lisbon became the world capital of espionage. Fluent in French, Portuguese, English and Spanish, he brings a cross-cultural perspective to his work, weaving archival research, personal testimony and rigorous historical analysis into cinematic narratives.

Susan E. Lindsey, right, is an author who was born and raised in Washington state and now lives in Coimbra, Portugal. She is the author of a forthcoming biography of the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who defied his government to issue life-saving visas to thousands of desperate refugees during World War II. She is also the author of Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia (2020), and numerous articles and essays. She studied with the eminent World War II historian Dr. Christopher R. Browning and credits him with triggering her interest in the Holocaust and rescuers.

Mariana Abrantes, left, who will moderate, is a Board member and the Portugal representative of the Sousa Mendes Foundation. Coming from a village in central Portugal, she studied Economics at UC-Berkeley and earned an MA from Princeton University. After training and working in Chase Manhattan Bank, she returned to Portugal, where she worked at the European Investment Bank. She also served in the Portuguese government’s Ministries of Transport and Health, and on the Boards of international investment funds and the Fulbright Commission Portugal.  She is a dual Portuguese-US citizen.

xxxxx

Registration for this program will open at a later date.