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.
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 1917 Burma (now Myanmar), a British diplomat is set to marry his fiancée, but after a sudden panic, escapes to Singapore, sending her on what evolves into a chase across Asia.
Luís is a professional killer and homosexual. In his specific universe, he is possessed by cocaine and an addiction to killing people. One day, while carrying out his profession, he falls in love with the corpse of the girl he killed.
A Portuguese horror and fantasy anthology.
Adaptation of the novel of the same name, by João Ricardo Pedro.
Alice, a recently widowed director, is alone on her grief after her daughter leaves home. Alice clings to the only structure she has, a fragile foundation at risk of collapsing: an essay film project, about first loves, dependent on funding. Suddenly we enter in another dimension, another place and without prior notice we are in the film conceived by the director.
Adventurer, pilgrim, penitent but above all outstanding writer, Fernão Mendes Pinto left us an unparalleled romance, the living and human palpitation of one of the greatest historical adventures of man.
Ricardo Monteiro is a successful television producer specialising in reality shows. He is 45 years old and he has just received an award for the most popular television show of the year, when he receives an ultimatum from his 18-year-old daughter Leonor. If he does not come home that same evening to celebrate her birthday he will never see her again. Ricardo is distracted by business or other commitments and he is too late for the last flight home. When he returns next day the apartment is empty and Leonor is gone. At first Ricardo thinks that it is only a game, but there are no phone calls or messages and after a while he gets worried and starts looking for her. He discovers that she has quit school without telling him and that she has lost all contact with her old friends. She has become a complete stranger.
Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest writers in Portuguese, created an immense parallel world and several heteronyms so as to endure the loneliness of genius. José Saramago, 1998 Nobel Laureate in Literature, has a heteronym, Ricardo Reis, return to Portugal after a 16-year exile in Brazil. 1936 is a perilous year with Mussolini’s fascism, Hitler’s Nazism, Spain’s Civil War and Salazar’s New State in Portugal. And Fernando Pessoa meets his creation, Reis. Two women, Lídia and Marcenda, are Reis’ carnal and impossible passions. “Life and Death as one” allows for literature and cinema.
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.
In an automated world, an old factory feeds on its own work force.
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.
Documentary about Vale do Côa.
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.
When almost everyone in their senses (or in their powers to do so so) has left a Western European Capital of millions of people under the threat of a colliding commet, a bar stays open in defyance. Two lovers are too self absorbed but not so much so that between drinks they cannot realise the barmen's infatuation with the lost girl who thinks she's just his last plaything and keeps playing jukebox songs (American/French-Italian/American) to that effect.
Based on a the short story "Low Flying Aircraft" by J.G. Ballard and set in a near future where humans are dying breed. Judite and André flee to a semi-abandoned apartment complex to protect their mutant child from certain death.
Luanda, Angola. The streets are deserted, the buildings empty and no ships leave the harbour. What's left are ghosts and memories. Concrete Affection – Zopo Lady is inspired by journalist Ryszard Kapuściński's descriptions of the last colonial days in Angola in 1976 and the exodus of Portuguese and white Angolans from Luanda.
Ubu, instigated by his wife, murders King Venceslau and usurps the throne of Poland. Intoxicated by power, this grotesque and coward character conducts his reign in an absurd and cruel way, leading his kingdom to ruin. A cinematographic adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s play, a political satire that, cyclically, turns to the reality of world politics.
The unbearable heat on the factory places us on the hottest summer days. A man who has been forced to leave everything behind tries to go to his daughter's birthday but receives threats from the court. In itself grows a wave of impatience, despair, violence. The violence not only of feelings but of things, materials, iron and metal, which deteriorate with time and the suffocating heat. In this industrial hell men merges with machines, they are near collapse.
Somewhere in an unspecified time, Patrick Mendes presents an initiation ritual in a community at the ends of the earth.
Mateus Lagoa and his wife Irene will celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary at a most luxurious resort on a tropical island, leaving their teenage son dangerously adrift. Before departure to paradise, during an unexpected night spent apart, the side effects of the vaccines strike them - fevers, fainting spells, shivers, hallucinations of all sorts. A melancholic mood creeps in and their world seems somehow fractured, capable of unsuspected and dangerous promises.
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.
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.
A journey through the real history and the tales of a region in southern Portugal and a portrait of the people who have lived there, weaving together accounts of rural workers and field notes of archaeologists, amateur footage and scientific drawings, legends, poems, and songs.