Inside, the premises were refurbished and a cinema was built in the grounds to the rear of the house, but the façade and floor plan of the original building remained unchanged. It is now one of the last houses still standing on Rua Barata Salgueiro, a street which as late as the 1960s was still almost entirely residential.

2 - The new cinema was inaugurated in September 1980. In January 1981, Manuel Félix Ribeiro - director of the Cinemateca since 1949 - and his staff of twenty-odd helpers left their former base in São Pedro de Alcântara (headquarters of the Instituto Português de Cinema, of which the Cinemateca was a department between 1973 and 1980) and took up residence in their new home.

This new home was done out in the mudejar-revival fashion so beloved of the late 19th century, with magnificently-worked stuccoes, floral motives and ceiling frescoes depicting scenes from mythology. The former dwelling of Morais Carvalho, leader of the controlling Regeneration faction in the upper chamber of the Portuguese parliament at the time of the earliest cinema screenings by the Animatographo Rousby in the Real Colyseu, Rua da Palma (1896), became a cinema in 1981. Arabesques and cusped arches, cupids and muses looked on. A Thousand and One Nights had passed, and now the house was a cinema.

3 - Twenty-two years have elapsed since then - twenty-one since the inauguration of our new premises in January 1982, one of the last official acts presided over by Félix Ribeiro, who died a few months later.

The Cinemateca has grown, and multiplied. One cinema burned down (April 1981) and another rose from its ashes (September 1982). The acquisition of Quinta da Cerca in Freixial at the close of the decade marked the beginning of the saga of the construction of our Archive, which was finally inaugurated in 1995. In 1997, the Cinemateca finally gained legal status as a museum.

There were twenty-seven of us in 1981 and there are eighty-one of us today, some sixty of whom work in the house on Rua Barata Salgueiro. In recent years, there has been room for nothing or nobody.

We needed new projection and viewing facilities. The attic and basement offered potential. We needed a real museum area, room for pictures from past and present to move in. We needed new public areas. The solution was to add an extension to the 19th-century building - with a new look but the same spirit.

Finally, in 1998, we gained planning permission for an audacious extension plan by architects Alberto Castro Nunes and António Maria Braga. Work began in February 2001 and lasted until October 2002. In December 2002, we returned home.

4 - The original house has been fully restored to its former splendour. Two basement cinemas have been built, plus a museum area (The 39 Steps), the best projection room in Lisbon, permanent and temporary exhibition rooms, new storage areas, new archives, a restaurant, and a bookshop.

The Cinemateca is no longer an administrative building with a cinema tacked onto it. Now, from its cellars to its cupolas, it's a meeting place. All we need now is to open the last of its seven seals and continue onwards to the museum we've always dreamed of.

And when that museum exists, time and space will come together in a meeting of image and imagination, a perpetual ebb and flow of beginnings and returns.