© 2026 The Couch Critic
Status
Released
Release
2012
Runtime
48m
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.
21 Cast Members
António Guterres
Self (archive footage)
António de Oliveira Salazar
Self - Prime Minister (archive footage)
Marcelo Caetano
Self - Prime Minister (archive footage)
Augusto Pinochet
Self - President of Chile (archive footage)
Mário Soares
Self - Prime Minister (archive footage)
François Mitterrand
Self - President of France (archive footage)
José Eduardo dos Santos
Self - President of Angola (archive footage)
José Manuel Durão Barroso
Self - Minister of Foreign Affairs (archive footage)
Américo Tomás
Self - President of the Republic (archive footage)
Gonçalo Amorim
Narrator / Visitor from 1910
Fernando Rosas
Self - Historian
António de Spínola
Self - President of the Republic (Archive Footage)
Belmiro de Azevedo
Self - Industrialist (Archive Footage)
Américo de Amorim
Self - Industrialist (Archive Footage)
Artur Santos Silva
Self - Banker (Archive Footage)
Pina Moura
Self - Minister of Finance (Archive Footage)
Jorge Coelho
Self - Government Minister
Mira Amaral
Self - Government Minister
Jorge Jardim Gonçalves
Self - Banker (Archive Footage)
Alexandre Soares dos Santos
Self - Businessman (Archive Footage)