The director decided to make this feature film, fictional, but biographical, shortly after making a documentary series for RTP -- "À porta da História"(2014) -, in which he addressed the life of Cândido de Oliveira.

"I realized that he was an exceptional character and that he was not worth one movie, but six movies!", exclaimed Jorge Paixão da Costa.

Despite the life of the footballer and coach being so full, the director, the screenwriters and the production company Ukbar Filmes decided to focus on one of the biographical periods, at the time when Cândido de Oliveira got involved in a web of espionage with the English, during the Second World War, and was arrested and tortured by the PIDE, in the 1940s.

"It had to do with my comfort zone", explained Jorge Paixão da Costa, regarding the chosen period, because he had already addressed the same historical period in the recent series "O Atentado" and "A Espia".

Furthermore, that "was Cândido's richest and most interesting moment", he admitted.

Antifascist and critic of Oliveira Salazar's dictatorship, Cândido de Oliveira (1896-1958) worked at the Post Office and wrote in the sports press when he got involved in an English espionage network, against German Nazi forces, during the Second World War, having participated in the assembly of a secret network of radio-telegraph operators.

The athlete ended up being discovered, arrested and beaten by the political police of the Estado Novo, and sent to the Tarrafal concentration camp, in Cape Verde, where he stayed for 18 months, between June 1942 and January 1944.

Upon returning to Portugal, he would only be "returned" to "probation" in May 1944, as can be read in the PIDE's file.

Up to that point, Cândido de Oliveira had already become known for having played at Benfica, for having founded the Clube Atlético Casa Pia, in the institution where he lived after becoming an orphan; he had already been the national football coach and worked as a journalist in the Portuguese press.

In 1945, already free and in Lisbon, Cândido de Oliveira co-founded the newspaper A Bola, together with António Ribeiro dos Reis and Vicente de Melo, and coached Sporting and Futebol Clube do Porto.

Cândido de Oliveira would die in 1958, in Stockholm, as a result of pneumonia, at a time when he was covering the World Cup, in Sweden.

Only in 1974 would the book he wrote about the time he was deported and imprisoned in Cape Verde be published, entitled "Tarrafal, the swamp of death".

Despite giving space to fiction to compose this 'biopic', Jorge Paixão da Costa tried to make known "an absolutely fantastic character, from an intellectual and psychological point of view", who was very fond of opera and who was "a carefree loner".

"He was a man surrounded by many people and at the same time very lonely", he said.

The film also brings to the surface a time when football did not have the importance or the "industrial culture" that it has today, but it was a sport that became popular on its own merit and by society, said the director.

"The only thing a guy could practically choose was the football club, and fight for his football club almost as if it were a political party (...). The Portuguese could not choose anything", he said.

In "Cândido, the spy who came from football", starring the actor Tomás Alves, also participate Jorge Corrula, Teresa Tavares, Filipe Vargas, Carloto Cotta, David Medeiros, Tiago Aldeia and Margarida Moreira, among others.

The film has a budget of 1.5 million euros and financial support from the Film and Audiovisual Institute, RTP, PIC Portugal, Turismo de Portugal and the Lisbon City Council.

Jorge Paixão da Costa, 69, is the author of, among others, the films "Adeus Princesa" (1990), "O mistério da estrada de Sintra" (2007), "Soldado Milhões" (2017), co-directed with Gonçalo Galvão Teles, and the series "A Espia", "Crónica dos Bons Malandros" and "Lúcia -- A guardiã do segredo".

Currently, Jorge Paixão da Costa is "negotiating a historical film mostly in French" about King Carlos of Portugal, assassinated in 1908, and Queen Amélia of Orleans, who died in 1951.

Leia Também: Exposição de arte contemporânea africana quer acabar com preconceito (Portuguese version)