Portuguese cinema has a long tradition, reaching back to the birth of the medium in the late 19th century. In the 1950s, Cinema Novo, (literally "New Cinema") sprang up as a movement concerned with showing realism in film, in the vein of Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave. Directors Manoel de Oliveira and João César Monteiro have gained Portuguese cinema international attention.

Portuguese silent film began its course on June 18, 1896, at the Real Colyseu da Rua da Palma nº 288, in Lisbon, as Edwin Rousby presented Robert William Paul's Animatograph, using a Teatrograph projector. This places the Portuguese début around six months after the Lumière brothers's inaugural presentation in Paris.

However, the Portuguese audience was already familiar with photograph projection, first at the "cicloramas", "dioramas" and the "stereoscopic" views and, later, the magic lantern, with the projection of transparent photographs in glass plate then colored.

On December 28, 1894, the German photographer Carlos Eisenlohr opened his "Imperial Exhibition" at the galleries of the Avenida Palace Hotel. Beyond the projections already familiar to the Lisbon audience, he presented the great novelty: the live photograph - shown not through an Edison Kinetograph, as it was announced at the time, but by the Elektrotachyscop or Schnellseher, an invention by Ottomar Anschutz, that A. J. Ferreira calls Electro-Tachiscópio Eisenlohr. The device projected images of actions, of a dog passing by or the gallop of a horse, contained in disks of small diameter that produced images of extremely short seconds.

Portugal ⁱ/ˈpɔrtʃʉɡəl/ (Portuguese: Portugal, IPA: [puɾtuˈɣaɫ]), officially the Portuguese Republic (Portuguese: República Portuguesa) is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula . Portugal is the westernmost country of mainland Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira are part of Portugal. The country is named after its second largest city, Porto, whose Latin name was Portus Cale.

The land within the borders of the current Portuguese Republic has been continuously settled since prehistoric times: occupied by Celts like the Gallaeci and the Lusitanians, integrated into the Roman Republic and later settled by Germanic peoples such as the Suebi, Swabians, Vandals and the Visigoths. In the 8th century most of the Iberian Peninsula was conquered by Moorish invaders professing Islam, which were later expelled by the Knights Templar under the Order of Christ. During the Christian Reconquista, Portugal established itself as an independent kingdom from León in 1139, claiming to be the oldest European nation state.