and industry that takes place along the cities main river, the Douro River. Rino Lupo invited Oliveira to show the film at the International Congress of Film Critics in Lisbon, where the majority of the Portuguese audience booed. However other foreign critics and artists who were in attendance praised the film, such as Luigi Pirandello and Émile 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. Over the next 10 years Oliveira struggled to make films, abandoning several ambitious projects and making a handful of short documentaries on subjects ranging from artistic portraits of coastal cities in Portugal to industrial films on the origins of Portugal's auto industry. One of these shorts was a documentary about the inauguration of the hydro-electrical plant that his father built, Hulha Branca. He also first met and befriended Portuguese playwright José Régio during this time period. Oliveira would go on to adapt four of Régio's plays as films. Fifteen years after his first attempt at filmmaking, Oliveira made his feature film debut in 1942. Aniki-Bóbó is a portrait of Porto's street children and based on a short story by Rodrigo de Freitas. Oliveira used non-professional actors to portray the children. The story centers around two young boys who compete for the attention of a young girl. One of the boys in an extroverted bully, while the other is shy and innocent. The film was a commercial failure when it opened, and its merit only came to be recognized over time. Oliveira stated that he was criticized for portraying children that lied, cheated and stole, which in his mind made them act more like adults. The film's poor reception forced Oliveira to abandon other film projects he was involved in, after which he dedicated himself to work in a vineyard that his wife had inherited. In the early 1950s he and Régio submitted a screenplay to the Estado Novo-run Film Fund commission, but the commission refused to either accept or reject the film. Oliveira attributed this to his own well known dislike for the Salazar regime. 1955–70: Return to filmmaking In 1955 Oliveira traveled to Germany to study new techniques in color cinematography. He re-emerged onto the film scene in 1956 with The Artist and the City, a twenty-six-minute documentary short film