Resumo

This paper will focus on the conflicts between Orientals and Westerners living in Macao at the beginning of the 20th century. The film Amor e Dedinhos de Pé by the director Luís Filipe Rocha, based on the homonymous novel by Henrique de Senna Fernandes will be analyzed from a perspective of a memory film as it presents a historical reconstruction that portrays the society of Macao at a time when the region was under Portuguese rule.
Through the adventures and misadventures of a young man from a declining bourgeois family, both the novel and the film denounce the contrast between Eastern and Western cultures that coexisted at the time. The relationship between the inhabitants will also be seen as a mirror of the social relations that show particularly intense moments of people’s life of the “Christian City” characterized by magnificent ballrooms, well dressed people and homes with servants, which contrasts with the poverty environment lived in the “Chinese Quarter” of dirty and tight alleys where people of humble appearance wander. The city described by Luís Filip Rocha is a place of encounters and disagreements, and also of (i)moral confrontations between East and West which help to characterize the main characters who, at various times, transgress the rules established by a closed and discriminatory society.