Laura and Lucas live temporarily in Berlin and are set to go back to Lisbon together soon. I guess this is how I think about myself too. That I will go back to Lisbon soon. But I often find myself doubting it and becoming a kind of split self. Because now with this crisis and the very controversial austerity IMF program running in Portugal I found most of my friends leaving Lisbon; and family about to mortgage their homes. I wanted to talk about this feeling of separation that I see in my generation, about this state of being in between an apparent solid past and an unknown future, about this identity in transition.
Marina Lenk is an experienced synchronized diver. However, an attack of Tinnitus — an unbearable ringing sound in the ears — drags her from the top of her game to the edge of madness.
Two characters of a portuguese film question their brief existence.
Rafa is a 13 years old kid concerned with his mother, held in a police station for driving without a license. The director shows a day in the life of a teenager who lives on a problematic area and discovers that her mother was arrested because of an automobile accident.
A scientist tells us that Pluto is no longer considered a planet. The feelings of disappointment and nostalgia, and the impossibility of being able to go back to certain moments of his life, make him want to find in the story of David an answer for whatever exists beyond science and reason.
A headlong dive into the deepest, silliest recesses of Abrantes’s unconscious.
Cinderella escapes at midnight, leaving behind one of her glass slippers. In the days that follow, the gay prince can't give up the idea of completing the pair.
Set in the 1950s Soviet Union, centers on a young artist who is commissioned to create Stalin's monument and must go through KGB scrutiny.
Adaptation of a 1987 novel by Agustina Bessa Luis, a multi-generation exploration of a wealthy family with a mysterious past and a house on the island of Madeira.
It’s 1942, and Portugal languishes under dictatorship and WWII rages just beyond its borders. Secrets, half-truths, and mistrust prevail in the state security office of chief inspector Varga, who makes professional privilege a cover for his unprofessional interest in a boldly carnal refugee and her alleged brother. Director/writer Saboga (screenwriter for Raúl Ruiz’s MYSTERIES OF LISBON) saturates the dark world of this predatory tale with steamy eroticism and paranoia, starting with the incestuous desires of his bi-curious adolescent daughter and including the family maid.
Nuno is the son of divorced parents. He lives a nomadic existence with his father: he lost all his friends and never stays long enough anywhere to make new friends. Now Nuno has become a drug addict, he’s in hospital, in a coma struggling between life and death. His father and his father’s sister remain by his bedside. The three separately evoke requests from the past and other characters they meet also complement their current life experiences and memories. Based on the novel by António Lobo Antunes.
There’s a myth that suggests the ghost of the 16th-century Portuguese king Don Sebastiaan founded a magical kingdom on the island of Lençóis off the Brazilian coast after his defeat against the Moors. Five centuries later, a young Portuguese woman (and a small film crew) arrives there. The island is still enchanting.
Passionate romance, brutal treachery, and selfless nobility are set against the background of Napoleon’s 1810 invasion of Portugal.
Jorge is a loner and a writer of popular books. At night, he looks through other people's windows and thinks that they are truly happy.
A Portuguese king who disappeared in the desert of Morocco in the sixteenth century comes forward. Under the threat of having to return to Portugal in the XXI century, Dom Sebastian reveals his whereabouts and the secrets of the kingdom he built over all these years in faraway Ilha de Lençóis in Northeastern Brazil.
The emotional journey of Yulya, a fragile and precious young woman.
Guilherme and Sofia, brother and sister, grow up sharing experiences and slowly discovering their sexuality. The thing that Sofia doesn't know is how far Guilherme will go to keep her inside his own perverse, dark and perfect circle.
Scheherazade narrates three more tales, supposedly selected from the 470th, 484th and 497th nights of her ordeal: “It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport himself to escape the Guard while dreaming of prostitutes and partridges. A wounded cow will reminisce about a thousand-year-old olive tree while saying what she must say, which will sound none less than sad!
Camila is a Portuguese therapist who works at Rio de Janeiro State University, where she attends Glória, the university's elevator operator. Throughout the sessions, Camila faces a very violent reality, since Glória was raped by her own father as a child and her brother Jonas is a dangerous bandit that is in prison. Increasingly frightened by the reports she hears, she feels threatened at the same time that Glória sees her as essential in her life.
Marta and Jorge have been a couple for seven years. All their friends think they are living a perfect romance. Too perfect, perhaps, for the despair of all: Bruno, who is much younger than Marta but madly in love with her; Lígia, who is Bruno's sister and Marta's best friend and would love to see her brother happy; Carlos, Jorge's friend, who maintains a superficial romance with Lígia while secretly in love with Marta; and for Jorge himself, who is afraid this idyllic romance will imprison him and, convinced that his love and his lover's desire to marry will take away his freedom, decides to show her the way into Carlos arms.
Lisbon; after another blistering summer, Miguel finds himself in a deep jadedness. An improvised party erupts at his apartment awakening the memory of a passion.
Inspired on the true events of the Portuguese king Don Pedro (14th Century) which unburied his mistress to make her queen after dead. This film tells the story of Pedro, a man admitted to a psychiatric hospital for traveling by car with the corpse of his beloved, recalling simultaneously three different lives: one from the past, another from nowadays and another one from an distopic future.
A young couple celebrate their Paper wedding anniversary. All is set for a romantic weekend just the two of them. But after a series of strange situations, they will very fast get embroiled on a path that has no turning back.
After the attack on Charlie Hebdo's office in Paris, Ivan, the frivolous son of a prominent Argentine journalist, embarks on a journey pursuing different geopolitical events around the world.
X, a film location scout, spend his time travelling from place to place looking for filming locations, at the same time that he's looking for funding for the film he wrote himself. In the middle of nowhere, as in the nowhere of his life, he stumbles on Y, the woman for whom he has been waiting all his life.
Welcome to Lisbon: there are mermaids by the Tagus and birds flying over the old city; there are mad scientists and singing fish; lost tourist guides and lost tourists; fado and sad guitars. What a weird city you may think - but no. Lisbon is about being different, sarcastic, welcoming to foreigners even in an economic crisis. Different directors became fascinated by our strangeness. We became fascinated by these directors. The city is never the same in these four episodes, here in Lisbon.
Luís Mário Lopes wrote the solo A Boa Alma for Mónica Calle in 2015, based on the works of Bertolt Brecht marking the departure of Casa Conveniente from Cais do Sodré and their arrival in the new venue in zona J, Chelas. The original score is by JP Simões.
In a strange villa, six young people are getting tanned. They are bored and get burnt, lying under the summer sun. They are children of the night, children of dreams. Coming from everywhere and nowhere, they are here, united like a tribe.
In Lisbon, Claudia offers guided tours in and out of the city. At night, she kills time with her sister in a modest apartment. In Lisbon, lonesome Martinho is fluent in Italian and guide tourists all around town. In Lisbon, a band is jamming. They perform improvisational noise jazz. In Lisbon, a mysterious phenomenon fills the air. Claudia and Martinho’s lonely hearts will discreetly meet to the sound of music.
The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure.
About to turn 35 years old and in the imminence of having to give up his music, Samuel comes to Lisbon to do a concert. He stays over at Teresa's, the attractive mother of his girlfriend, a woman who resists getting old. During 3 days, accomplices and inert, they create a silent intimacy, feeling time overcome them without knowing where to go.