Douro, Faina Fluvial is a 1931 Portuguese documentary short film. It was the first film directed by Manoel de Oliveira

Manoel de Oliveira

Manoel Cândido Pinto de Oliveira, GCSE is a Portuguese film director born in Cedofeita, Porto. He began working on films in the late 1920s, but did not receive international recognition until the early 1970s. Since the late 1980s he has been one of the most prolific working film directors and...

 and is a portrait of his hometown of Porto

Porto

Porto , also known as Oporto in English, is the second largest city in Portugal and one of the major urban areas in the Iberian Peninsula. Its administrative limits include a population of 237,559 inhabitants distributed within 15 civil parishes...

 and the labor and industry that takes place along the cities main river, the Douro River. The film was first shown at the International Congress of Film Critics in Lisbon on September 19, 1931, where the majority of the Portugese audience booed the film. However other foreign critics and artists who were in attendance praised the film, such as Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written...

 and Emile Vuillermoz. Oliveira re-edited the film with a new soundtrack and re-released it in 1934. And again in 1994, Oliveira modified the film by adding a new, more avant-garde soundtrack by Freitas Branco.

Oliveira was influenced by German filmmaker Walther Ruttmann's documentary

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 Berlin: Symphony of a City, and Douro, Faina Fluvial was made in the same genre of city symphony films.