A hotel by the northern shore of Portugal welcomes its guests over the weekend. A man is torn between being present for his wife and the space that his mother takes up between the two of them. A mother encourages her daughter’s marriage to enable her own love affair with her son-in-law. Another mother lives through her daughter, preventing her from making her own decisions. Three families at the end of their cycles of acceptance.
In a family-run hotel, by the Portuguese northern shore, lives a group of women from different generations of the same family, whose relationships with each other have grown poisoned by bitterness. They try to survive in the declining hotel, as the unexpected arrival of a granddaughter to this oppressive space stirs trouble, reviving latent hatred and piled-up resentments.
Alexandra Lencastre plays a woman who believes she is President of the U.S.A.
A crime drama based on the life of a woman who lived for years with a man that was the head of a corruption network in the Portuguese football world.
Three homeless teenage rejects struggle to survive together. Of them, Andreia is pregnant, while Pedro and Ricardo hustle, steal and are exploited by a pornographer.
Young Jesus is taken on a vacation by his parents (Rita Blanco, Adriano Luz) to a deserted beach resort. They accidentally fall into overnight wealth after Jesus digs in the sand, uncovering a large drug stash. Others characters intersecting here include an alcoholic actress, a philandering banker, a general trafficking in arms, priests who close their church and head north as hitchhikers, politicians who watch an all-girl production of Julius Caesar, and beggars who recite a children's story in a huge heap of trash.
A regular family living in the outskirts of Lisbon sees the serenity of their lives shaken beyond any remedy within a week.
Five characters intersect at a sidewalk beginning a journey through their lives.
Georges and Anne are in their eighties. They are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter, who is also a musician, lives abroad with her family. One day, Anne has a stroke, and the couple's bond of love is severely tested.
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.
Throughout a year's work, a group of ten actors and a film director will work together on the creation of the characters and on the structure of the plot of a new film to come. Long sessions of discussion, rehearsals and endless repetitions serve to develop the most important scenes of that plot until it takes its ultimate form, in the film which results from this work.
The darkness of night, a barely lit place, motorbikes flirting with danger: a group of teenagers at a crossroads playing chicken with unaware passing cars. Jota (Eduardo Frazão) stands out from this group, unclassifiable; his destiny has no straight lines save those on the asphalt. Jota lives in permanent conflict with everything and everybody in his small town. No room for stillness. And then comes Margarida (Ana Moreira). Jota has no inside, Margarida has no outside. In spite of, or because of, that, they meet. What can they do? They can just ride, they can get away with it even if its all messed up. Love is to be lived.
She arrives home at the end of the day, tired. While she prepares dinner, he reads the newspaper. Finally, she decides to bake some special cookies.
Organized like a dream, structured like a musical and with texts, both spoken and sung, that lead us to unexpected, chaotic and exciting situations, which try to grasp part of what the unattainable Alexandre O'Neill left us.
In the beautiful area of Paris, Maria and José Ribeiro lived for almost thirty years on the ground floor of a Haussmann building, in their dear little lodge.
A touching and tragic real life story about a group of Portuguese fishermen who get caught in the middle of a storm in the Tejo river (Lisbon) and struggle to survive.
Maria is a sweet child. She hasn’t father and doesn’t like her mother. She has a boyfriend, A bandit who would like to change his class.
During one winter night, a Portuguese teenager, Alvaro, loses his life in a fight between a youth gang and the cops in a suburb of Paris. Cidalia, a 36 year old cleaning woman, his mother, decides to defy the code of silence of the Portuguese community and tries to find the truth. She losses her friends, her job and her family but gains a life.
When Edward’s search for his biological family leads him and his girlfriend Ryley to a magnificent villa high in the mountains of Northern Portugal, he is full of excitement at meeting his long-lost mother and twin brother. Finally, he will discover who he is and where he comes from. But nothing is as it seems, and Edward will soon learn that he is linked to them by a monstrous secret.
This remake of the 1940 film with the same name tells the story of a theatre company, its men and women in love, mistakes and misunderstandings. Chico loves Tatão, who is courted by Artur. Graça loves Chico, but doesn't know he loves Tatão. Santana writes a play for the Grandelinhas that will serve as a guide to Chico passion and convince Tatão that he is a rich count. The play is then staged and they all end up in prison.
A film about two young women, trying to decide how to go on with their lives and loves: Marie just dumped her boyfriend, who's married and can see her just secretly twice a week. At this point Pipa invites her to join her on a visit at her home at the coast of Portugal. Only when they are arrived there, Marie learns that Pipa has come to marry Manuel, and that she too is unsure if she'll be happy with her decision.
Summer of 1964. The professor Carlos and the couple Dário and Alda spend time together in the beach during vacations. Away from the colonial war, everything seems lost in time.
The tragedy and comedy in Carlos' life begins, grows and ends like the tragedy and comedy of Portugal. In the company of his close friend, João da Ega, allegedly a brilliant writer, Carlos, with his idle existence as an aristocratic doctor, spends his time to enjoying friends and lovers. Until he falls in love. She is a new character in this revolutionary novel. It's a vertiginous passion that goes beyond that past gloominess to reach a new and darker abyss, incest.
After years living in Lisbon, Castro's family makes the decision to move to the countryside.
Following Marta's wake, her five best friends decide to spend the night at a rural tourist getaway that Marta never got around to opening. The night becomes a long, mazelike journey through their interconnecting friendships, ultimately leading to deep self-revelations about life, themselves and a friendship that survived it all. But will this friendship be able to survive death?
Eloi, a paunchy middle-aged man, finds Samuel, a young sad sack, about to kill himself by plunging into the sea. Eloi takes Samuel under his wing, giving him a hot meal and bringing him to a seedy night club to introduce him to Esperança, who is said to be the most beautiful sex worker in Lisbon—and is also Eloi’s daughter.
The complex relationship between master and servant is explored in director João Botelho's adaptation of Denis Diderot's popular novel Jacques le Fataliste et Son Maître. As Tiago (Rogério Samora) drives his master (André Gomes) through the Portuguese countryside to an unspecified destination, the traveling pair embark on a series of highly philosophical discussions. Flowing with tales of his life in the military and previous sexual escapades, Tiago trades a series of tales with his rapt passenger, including the story of a vengeful spurned lover who plots revenge on the nobleman who rejected her by transforming a prostitute into a society lady and convincing him to marry the tainted bride.
Neves and his wife Celia are the owners and managers of the 'Little Star Pension', a familiar hotel that caters to bourgeois family and would-be actors, instead of the ill-reputed 'Good-Night Pension' (just across the narrow street), where gigolos, whores, and criminals of all sorts may go for a quick encounter. However, not all is well among the ten residents of 'Little Star Pension': each dialogue line from every hotel guest is evidence that he, or her, has a reason (actually, more than one) to hate Neves - to the point of wishing him dead. Carelessness (or devious intention) by one party will provide the means; another, will create the propitious moment; yet another, and then the rest of them will create the festive New Year's Eve occasion - to do with Neves forever! Obviously, only the famous world private-eye Hércules Pirôt can solve the crime... for which he is called by phone, even before the deed is done.
The journey of 11 women while they go on a pilgrimage from Bragança to Fatima.
Struggling against the crisis in Portugal, a mother doubles up jobs to pay the bills since her husband is unemployed. Their teenage daughter tries to keep living everyday life even if the money is running short, which makes everything uneasy. Escaping from their common reality, they slowly become strangers to one another, as the tension grows in silence and in guilt.
Twenty-five years after leaving school, a group of former students decide to organise a reunion. But, contrary to expectations, these "old boys" realise that time has accentuated their differences. The atmosphere is tense, the conversation taut and the old grudges resurface in no time.
A disturbing film about the Portuguese underworld of prostitution.
Lisbon, today. In a room of a house at Douradores Street, a man invents dreams and theorizes about them. The essence of the dreams itself becomes physical, palpable, visible. The text itself materializes in its musicality. And, in front of our eyes, this music can be felt with the ears, brain and heart. It spreads itself in the street where the man lives, in the city that he loves above all and over the entire world.
An anthology film drama featuring a poetic mirror structure based on existential identity. In "The Immortals," adapted from a Helder Prista Monteiro play, two famous doctors, an 80-year-old father, and his 60-year-old son, contemplate senility and death. "Suzy," from an Antonio Patricio story, is set in the '30s when a young courtesan dies on the operating table. "Mother of the River" is from an Agustina Bessa-Luis fable about eternal life.
A film adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel "Hard Times" set in a Portuguese industrial town of the 1980s.
In order to make some much-needed cash for himself, 65-year-old Portuguese prison inmate Eugenio impersonates a young woman and begins a romantic correspondence with a lonely Portuguese truck-driver living in Boston, convincing him that her tragic life has culminated in financial dire straits so he will send money. At first Eugenio's sister Idalina assists him in creating the character of Maria da Luz. Touched by her sweetness and apparent loving nature, the trucker willingly sends her money. When Idalina starts fearing they will be caught, she backs out of her arrangement with Eugenio who then convinces his young cellmate Vasco to help write the letters and even sends a picture of himself at age seven to "prove" that Maria has a young son. As prison life exacts an increasingly heavy toll upon Eugenio's health, his feminine alter-ego helps sustain him.
Zé Alberto and Laura are lovers, and have a clandestine and permanently threatened relationship. Zé Alberto is married to Fernanda, Laura's sister, whose husband is in prison for murder. Fernanda is aware of Laura's relationship with her husband and constantly threatens them to tell Armando everything. Laura and Armando have a daughter - Sónia - whose greatest defect is greediness and the highest quality to cover up her mother's romance with her uncle. The fear of the two lovers increases and events precipitate when they receive the news that Armando is about to go on parole ...
A lorry, a road and an unpredictable destiny, all intersecting in a human trafficking network. Caught up in this web, Viktoriya has only one chance: fight to survive.
A policeman lunching with his daughter is present when a dead body washes up on shore. He investigates, leading him down a twisted and muddled path of nefarious connections reflecting, somewhat, his own life.
A young woman, working as sales-girl at a shopping center's music shop, wants someone with whom to share her secrets. A distant mother separating from her father, an aunt who emigrated to France, and her pre-adolescent sister, can't do - neither the boyfriend. Such a confident arrives unexpectedly - but then there are three of them, one too much. One leaves, but then another young man arrives, and there are three again. One must go. A sad young adult love story, told in the first person, singular - and ultimately alone, under the rain.
Lisbon, on a winter day in 1994, between six and fourteen o'clock. A forty-year-old woman despairs in the last eight hours preceding the birth of her first child.
Things are going well to a married couple, they have two sons, and things are going well in their respective jobs, Until the husband betrays her wife with another woman, and their son becomes seriously hill.
A moment in the life of a grievieng mother with the identity crisis of her teenage daughter. The mother insists on wanting to understand what she only should accept, the daughter can not explain what should be accepted.
An aristocratic Sicilian family living in the 1950s. Count Villafratti has sex one night with his nymphomaniac daughter because he thinks she is his wife.
Director Jorge Silva Melo has developed a viable, though highly intellectual mystery story about the world of art and culture and murder in this somewhat theatrical presentation. When German artist Bernd Hoffmann (Michael König) arrives in Lisbon to oversee the installation of his paintings in a joint exhibition with another Berlin artist, Hanna Brauer (Charlotte Schwab), Hanna never shows up. Hoffmann is puzzled because he is certain he saw a video sequence with Hanna at the exhibition, and he begins to look for her. Another Lisbon cultural center, a theater, is also having problems that may or may not be related -- and the mystery deepens when Hanna is found dead, either by her own hand, or murdered.
Documentary about the life and work of Mário Eloy, one of the greatest painters of the second generation of modernism in Portugal.
Cinema and affections from life in images and what goes on outside the frame. 'Snapshots' of shootings and the present-day memory of directors, actors and technicians.
This short film is based upon a book of tales "Exemplary Crimes" by Max Aub who, in his turn, was inspired by real testimonies that describe crimes straightforwardly. The Testimonies are individual confessions by different persons that have nothing in common but the fact that all committed murder.
A woman alone with her secret until one day she can not hold it any longer.
New years special aired on RTP on 1991
ProfJam wanted to show the contrast for his debut album and do it using the big screen
A large, time-worn house sits on a towering, untouchable pedestal. Ressaca Bailada – Filme Concerto follows individuals as they navigate their relationship with freedom, unity, and isolation within this setting. Celebrating tradition while confronting and questioning it, all against a backdrop of music that shapes the journey.
The misfortunes of Sofia, the exemplary Madalena and Camila, the troubled vacations of girls and boys, a few years later leading to the resolution of some mysteries, form the perfect trilogy by the Countess of Ségur on education, social, religious, and political power. Desire and its oppression, violence and punishment, in short, the terrible loss combined with inevitable growth. Both adults and children will understand that precepts, rules, and prayers can tear nerves and blood apart.