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.
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.
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?
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.
A film about General Humberto Delgado's brutal assassination by the Portuguese fascist police in 1965.
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.
“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.
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.
This documentary portrait covers all the themes of Daveau’s rich life: from her field research and private life to feminism and the influence of the modern age on family relationships and science. Her passionate life is examined in detail in an inexhaustible series of stunning archival photos and home videos recorded by Daveau, and in voice-over she speaks openly, extensively and full of wonder about life and the world around her.
In a city where nature has been forbidden, a small crime by a simple man triggers a chain of unexpected consequences.
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.
On the riverside quay of the enormous container port of Lisbon two old decaying sky-blue painted buildings are located directly opposite to each other. One is closed and abandoned, the other inhabited by the two bright and inquisitive girls Ana and Matilde. Watching the closed building every single day and night the sisters get more and more suspicious. Strange phenomenons and movements behind the thick blue walls increase their curiosity. How is possible what their children`s eyes are witnessing? Who are those mysterious neighbours? How to discover old house`s secret?
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.
After the structural collapse at a construction site, Paulo loses his job because he denounces the situation to the authorities.
As a result of the pandemic and the economic crisis, there is a widespread revolt in the main cities of the country and Paulo and Cristina, an upper-middle-class couple with a newborn child, only do not join the popular indignation because they agreed, that same night, to organize a dinner for two friends: João, going through a divorce process that plunges him into a strange depression; and Raquel, Cristina's childhood friend who has spent the last few years crossing the planet on a journey of self-discovery. It's a night where, while the world changes outside, people reveal themselves inside, in this apartment where the confrontation between the real and the virtual reveals the most terrible truths.
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.
A documentary about Margot Dias (Germany, 1908 - Portugal, 2001), an ethnologist who shot between 1958-61 among the Makonde tribe, at Mueda, Mozambique. The film is an inner journey that will gradually unravel the circumstances in which these original filming were made, during the period of Portuguese domination of Mozambique, based on Margot Dias' unpublished diary and other texts and sounds, from archives related to the colonial period. But it's also these materials' confrontation with the people we are meeting on the trip to Mozambique, to whom we want to return part of its history.
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.
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.
