In a family-run strip club somewhere in the Portuguese countryside, tensions are running high. A Russian mafioso demands the surrender of one of the manager’s daughters as compensation for betraying his trust. Based on a Greek tragedy, Noite Escura represents João Canijo at his most virtuoso, the camera wandering from the escorts to the clients so as to interweave different narratives — a process that would become central to his later films. For the first time in Porto we present the director’s cut in this screening, with 10 additional minutes that were recovered during the film’s recent digitisation.