This, in order of appearance, is the cast of our book: fourteen Portuguese women directors active between the 1970s and the present day, working on fiction and documentary, short and feature-length films, with varying degrees of visibility, within and beyond Portugal. Some are established prizewinners, some are relatively new to the profession, some have battled for decades to get the resources they need and some of them will play more than one ‘role’, and be explored from various different angles, in the chapters that follow. Women’s Cinema in Contemporary Portugal problematizes current understandings of Portuguese cinema, women’s cinema and world cinema. It analyses the relationship between these three concepts, and the ways in which, taken together, they offer a productive theoretical framework for the study of contemporary film, at a time when questions of scale and territory, marginality and centrality, and nationality and gender are more relevant than ever in the realm of cinema.