Filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos sifts through the memories of her ancestors. Her naval officer grandfather, Henrique, who married her grandmother, Beatriz, on her 21st birthday, spent extended periods at sea, leaving her with six children. This is the beginning of a generational saga.
Three Portuguese queer short films brought together in a program that charts an alternative path through converging universes, forming a new constellation of desires, fears, and struggles. Entre a Luz e o Nada by Joana de Sousa, Sob Influência by Ricardo Branco, and Uma Rapariga Imaterial by André Godinho are three cinematic gestures that explore techniques and narratives from science fiction to horror, seeking new ways to view and imagine other possibilities. After traveling through various festivals, these films can now be experienced together, in a mutual exploration of mysterious worlds, unsettling dreams, and singular visions.
The mysteriously familiar face of a deceased young woman shakes young surgeon Fabian out of his lethargy. On a whim, he leaves Berlin for Portugal, determined to win back his former girlfriend Doro, who works at an architectural company in Lisbon.
On a secluded island lives an autonomous community of children who don’t speak, communicating only in gestures. Guided by the eldest among them, they operate like an agrarian commune with strict rules and beliefs. Adults are banished into the surrounding woods, and every year, the oldest member of the village is sent to jump off a cliff – a ceremony that is believed to bestow eternal youth on the chosen one. This way of life is threatened when one adventurous child heeds the call of the forbidden forest.
After a spell cast by Grandma Faraway, the oldest son of a small family encounters the ghost of his late Grandma Maria still living in her old house, and they chat as they used to.
Based on one of the short stories from the "Decameron", "The Convent Gardener" mirrors the story of Young Gardener Masetto and presents, in two separate parts, the story of a young man and a young woman who pretend to be mute in order to get a job as a gardener in a convent inhabited by several women and several men, respectively. Because the young gardeners are mute and, therefore, assumably unable to reveal the secrets of the convent’s residents, all the women living there take action to sleep with the young man just as all the men do to sleep with the young woman.
Ana is spending the holidays with her family. The setting is perfect for relaxation and for wondering. Next to the house, workers are building a pond. Attracted by it, Ana senses a presence, someone familiar yet still unknown. Alexander David captures on screen all the beauty of a childhood self-discovery and the first uncertain steps taken outside of parental control. Evocative and mellow, Water Hazard explores queer identity with a delicate and empathetic eye.
Cássia goes to sleep to the sounds of her alcoholic father and wakes up with the crow of her rooster bred for cockfighting. Her routine obeys a disciplined logic of restlessness and hard work. Between driving her father's taxi and tending their rooster, she is on the verge of breaking out to find a life of her own.
Wayward boy punishes his mother’s lover. Beauty and horror fondle each other. Young gods callously abjure conventional morality. Death goes whoring in child’s guise.
Filmed over 15 years, Deuses de pedra draws careful lines between past and present, portraying a beautiful land and the beautiful souls of those who live there.
In summer, the Portuguese countryside is ravaged by fires. Otilia struggles between her job as a pool cleaner and the need to take care of her mother alone. Stunned by this suffocating daily life, the flames awaken in her solitude, despair and the desire to escape.
Daughter of two worlds, the one that the English parents left behind and the Portuguese land of her upbringing that still calls her a foreigner, Ruby moves between the borders of both, without belonging to either.
Portugal. 15th century. Monks build a wall around a forest to bar the entry of women. But in the world of the unseen, lit by their souls, women have made their kingdom of invisibility without walls.
It’s summer and it feels like everything is melting. The body melts in sweat and the afternoon fades into endless nights. Weird dreams invade Shade’s sleep and unexplainable lights appear in the sky. Between work, home and friends, Shade seems to be floating. They are in suspension, in an intermediate state in which the reality of the world does not sustain itself.
From archival images, an improbable story is woven of a boy who couldn't stop crying, creating both floods and paradises.
Everything starts in a dream in which I told my mother that I was going to look for the hundreds of children that my grandmother helped coming into life. She was a midwife and a healer for over forty years in the deep desertic Sertão of Northeast Brazil. Her name was Aurora. I did not get to know her. From one encounter to another, with the alive and the dead, the film follows the traces of Aurora’s ghost and confronting the structural violence, gender and racial wise, present in Brazil’s historical formation.
