This Special Issue has its origins in a symposium hosted by the Institute for Modern Languages Research (IMLR) in London, January 2016. Bringing together a team of researchers from Portugal and the United Kingdom, ‘Portuguese film: Colony, postcolony, memory’ aimed to investigate scholarly engagement with the colonial and postcolonial in Portuguese cinema. The discussion addressed the concerns of both postcolonial studies and memory studies, and was centred on films from different periods in Portuguese cinema, from Feitiço do Império/Spell of the Empire (António Lopes Ribeiro, 1940) to Yvone Kane (Margarida Cardoso, 2014), as well as photography and television in the work of Filipa César and the RTP (Portuguese Radio and Television) series Depois do Adeus (2013).