For example, if the film by Julien Duvivier, Pépé-le-Moko (1936), was not commercially distributed in Portugal, that fact can likely be explained by its final denouement, in which the villain is prevented from being arrested – and thus serving the deserved punishment – because he commits suicide. For these reasons, João Bénard da Costa was only able to see the classic Battleship Potemkin (1925), directed by Eisenstein, when he was twenty-three years old, on his first trip to Paris. This film was banned in Portugal for over forty-nine years (Ibid, p. 20-21).

In 1980, João Bénard da Costa was appointed deputy director of the Portuguese Cinematheque, its director in 1991, and in 1997 he became its president. In 2007, he was re-appointed its director due to the change in the law of the Portuguese Cinematheque – Cinema Museum. His role as a programmer was remarkable in the Portuguese film scene and can be explained by his having been trained by the enthusiasm for and love of cinema. If programmers like him still exist, they are very rare. Unlike most film programmers, John Bénard da Costa did not base his work in relation to the academic or university world, which would mean prohibiting the personal involvement of the viewer and the inherent feeling of pleasure.

Like many of his generation, but also those who came before or after, João Bénard da Costa discovered film through a personal journey. Perhaps his emotional connection to film may explain, according to António Rodrigues, "his blind spots, like Fellini and documentary filmmaking in general, which he did not like. Particularly for having been trained by the Cahiers du Cinéma of the 1950s (he was sixteen years old when the magazine was founded on the ashes of the Revue du Cinéma) (...)" (ibid., p. 19). As this author then states, for someone like João Bénard da Costa, trained in the 1950s, anyone who made a good film in his or her life is a great director forever and therefore a great filmmaker is not allowed to make bad films. His subjectivity, inherent in the way it literally enters every film he sees, is explicitly revealed through a written hallmark in the Folhas da Cinemateca, which he himself wrote: João Bénard da Costa underlined words or bits of sentences as a way of highlighting their importance in the context of what he wanted to say. This underlining is another way of emphasising a particular aspect that he considered emotionally pertinent and absolute for the understanding of a particular film, similar to how in his work Muito lá de casa (1994) he confesses that he fell madly in love with Esther Williams... But also with Joan Fontaine, and also with Alida Valli... All of them "the most beautiful women in the world", although later, as he confesses, his opinion and taste changed a few times.

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