The Ornithologist 2016
Stranded along a sublime river fjord in northern Portugal, an ornithologist is subjected to a series of brutal and erotic Stations-of-the-Cross-style tests.
Stranded along a sublime river fjord in northern Portugal, an ornithologist is subjected to a series of brutal and erotic Stations-of-the-Cross-style tests.
Hamburg, Germany, 1939. Getting a passage aboard the passenger liner St. Louis seems to be the last hope of salvation for more than nine hundred German Jews who, desperate to escape the atrocious persecution to which they are subjected by the Nazi regime, intend to emigrate to Cuba.
A nun is called upon to adopt her 15-year-old nephew, and as a consequence religious, familial and sensual love become entangled.
On set, in the middle of the Atlantic Forest, a stressed film director begins another day of filming, reproducing the celebration of the first mass in Brazil. Suddenly three strange agents emerge from the forest and abruptly interrupt the scene. Authoritarians, they confiscate the filmed negatives. The paranoid director grumbles: "Are they from the government?". The execution of the film is compromised. Will the director in trouble be able to complete his film?
1920s. Vitalino, a small farmer from São Vicente sees his father die of the epidemic which decimated the country. Some years later, of all the brothers, Vitalino is the strongest and takes his father’s place in the house. But the village is too small for his aspirations and he decides to head to Brazil, leaving his sisters in charge of the household. In parallel with Vitalino’s story, If I Were a Thief… I’d Steal portrays the world of Paulo Rocha rummaging through his films and ghosts over the years.
Shaken by a divorce in the 1920s, Portuguese poetess Florbela Espanca uses her writing to deal with her tumultuous relationship with men, eroticism and love.
Part memoir, part city symphony, part noir-ish B-movie adventure, the new feature from critically acclaimed film-making duo João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata (To Die Like a Man) is a sensual, shape-shifting ode to one of the world's most mythic, alluring and exoticized cities.
After the structural collapse at a construction site, Paulo loses his job because he denounces the situation to the authorities.
Roberto, a retired and disappointed journalist, leaves his work in a farm and goes back to his hometown, Braga, which he thinks will be his last hiding place. However, in returning, he feels a strong energy in the city and between journeys to the past and an intense night life, a new chapter arises.
From Sunday to Sunday, the Arcozelo football field is battered by the North wind. The lawn has to be swept and lots of clothes washed. - The boys are coming! - The two equipment managers, São and Cunha, know the name of the little players. Everyone is taken care of and the socks drying on the goals are also to be lent.
A film about General Humberto Delgado's brutal assassination by the Portuguese fascist police in 1965.
Every summer Ana goes to Bustarenga, a small mountain village in the interior of Portugal. At the age of 36, this Parisian woman of Portuguese origin is still single. The inhabitants of the village, worried about her future, make her understand that the clock is ticking. Ana listens to the advice and warnings of the villagers to find a Prince Charming according to the principles of the village.
According to Sigmund Freud: “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways”. “Umbral” materialises the moral dilemma of whether there is a cause and effect link between trauma and criminal behaviour.
Ashore portrays the life of a singular fisherman in an ancient riverfront community near Lisbon. Divided between the quiet solitude of the river and the family ties that wash him ashore, the film follows Albertino Lobo, as nature renews itself with each season cycle.
People speak in conversations and banal situations, a loose, uncompromising, though sometimes tense and timid speech. It is these voices that tell minimal stories that the image unmasks, multiplies or breathes: universes that are people-house (or house-people) are anchored in boxes, bodies, secrets, desires, looks or in the ephemerality of the stories. In this flow, we access unstable territories, places of being in permanent construction - the inner house of each one.
Portugal, 1944. In a country oppressed by a brutal dictatorship, there are those who resist and mobilize the people to fight for bread and freedom, even if it cost them prison, torture or their lives.
A film about the vortex of time. It’s also about childhood and how it marks us for life. It’s a film that speaks of the relationship a son has with his father. And of the many words never spoken because they’re written in one’s heart.
“A Dança do Cipreste” (The Cypress Dance) springs from our interest in the immanent transformations of the body driven by dreams and desire, love and death, in their lucid and ghostly variants. Embracing the influence of imagination in the encounter with nature, it brings to light relationships of continuity and discontinuity with other beings and elements, as it follows the movements of a family circle. Mariana appears to us in her solitude, a woman and painter, at the height of her search for pleasure and desire, committed to artistic representations and her family life. Witty figures of strangeness, eroticism and violence emerge. Mariana, Henrique, Artur and Rafael, together or individually, find themselves in mutual projections and symbiotic relationships, in the days spent outdoors and in imaginary places. A sensorial portrait, which combines simple relationships of contact and affection, exploratory moments in nature and creations of the spirit.
Forty years ago, Sério Fernandes was a television advertising director and owner of one of the most successful advertising companies in Portugal. That's when he decides to leave everything to focus on his own movies. Nowadays, Sério Fernandes is known as the master of Oporto’s school.