Considered the best of the commissioned short films which effectively served as Oliveira's filmmaking apprenticeship, Bread follows the birth and life of a loaf, from the wheat fields to the bakery. Almost entirely silent, Bread is an important transitional work between the montage driven Douro, Working River and Oliveira's later work. It was during the search for locations for Bread that Oliveira discovered the local Passion play that would become the subject of his breakthrough film, Rite of Spring.

Oliveira's first feature is a remarkable proto-neorealist film, notable for its use of child non-actors and actual locations in Oliveira's native Porto. Aniki-Bóbó, whose title derives from a child's game, fully adopts the children's perspective to tell a surprisingly adult story of friendship and betrayal between two boys and the girl who is the object of their rival affection. The perceived radicalism of Aniki-Bóbó, with its barely restrained critique of institutional authority, was responsible for Oliveira's persecution and brief imprisonment by the conservative Salazar dictatorship and, even worse, resulted in a devastating twenty year hiatus during which he was effectively blacklisted and had almost every film project thwarted.