O Som e a Fúria

Lisbon, Portugal, 2010. Pilar, a pious woman devoted to social causes, maintains a peculiar relationship with her neighbor Aurora, a temperamental old woman obsessed with gambling who lives tormented by a mysterious past.

Zé, a 50-year-old alcoholic, works in the port of Lisbon where he loads and unloads containers. Zé never left his neighborhood and is hiding his savings so that one day he'll be able to board one of the huge cruise ships he sees everyday. When his jealous wife steals his money, Zé will do everything to fulfil his dream.

In a remote South American colony in the late 18th century, officer Zama of the Spanish crown waits in vain for a transfer to a more prestigious location. He suffers small humiliations and petty politicking as he increasingly succumbs to lust and paranoia.

On a remote volcanic island that everybody wants to leave, little Nana learns to stay. Her mother, Nia, went into exile right after she was born and Nana grows up in the family of her father. One day, the family learns that Nia is ill. Nana begins to develop high fevers and is sent to the foot of a volcano for treatment. There she encounters a world steeped in magical realism, between dreams and reality. Later, when Nana is a teenager, her mother Nia finally returns to the island.

Every night, in danger of being beheaded, Scheherazade tells King Shahryar unfinished tales to continue them the following night, hence defying his promise of murdering his new wives after their wedding night. Scheherazade tells King Shahryar her stories but these are not those in the book. As in the book, these stories are tragic and comical, with rich and poor, powerless and powerful people, filled with surprising and extraordinary events.

Suellen is a toll booth attendant who starts using her job to help a gang of thieves steal watches from people driving to the coast. But only for a noble cause: to send her son to an expensive gay conversion workshop.

Everybody has always loved Jeanne. These days, she hates herself. Up to her ears in debt, she has to go to Lisbon and sell her mother’s apartment, who passed away one year ago. At the airport, she runs into Jean, a whimsical and somewhat intrusive former high school classmate.

In which Scheherazade doubts that she will still be able to tell stories to please the King, given that what she has to tell weighs three thousand tonnes. She therefore escapes from the palace and travels the Kingdom in search of pleasure and enchantment. Her father, the Grand-Vizier, arranges to meet her at the Ferris wheel, and Scheherazade resumes her narration: “Auspicious King, in old shanty towns of Lisbon there was a community of bewitched men who, in all rigour and passion, dedicated themselves to teaching birds to sing…”. And seeing the morning break, Scheherazade fell silent.

About three generations of a family grappling with a life-changing experience during one day of a vacation in the historic town of Sintra, Portugal.

At Uz, an isolated hamlet in the northern mountains of Portugal, four generations live together in a group of around fifty people. When life is rough, solidarity is of the highest order. Everything else is left in God’s hands. They could have emigrated, like so many others, but chose to stay and keep their ancestral way of life, away from the racket of modernity.

A team-building event goes wrong and brings the owner of an architect studio face-to-face with the lower-class neighborhood that his company is gentrifying.

The story of Brazil’s first emperor, returning to Europe on board the English ship Warspite. The trip makes Pedro conquer his fears and face his life from a personal point of view. He goes back in time and relives outstanding moments of his earlier life – since his childhood, when in 1808 he arrived coming from Portugal with his family, until he left in the dead of the night, in 1831, running away from Brazil.

Crista, Carloto and João are building an airy greenhouse for butterflies in the garden. The three of them share household routines, day after day… And they are not the only ones.

A young adolescent, living with a swinger couple in a campsite, meets an emotionally unstable man and finds herself fascinated by his special powers.

The end of the Cold War did not bring about a definitive thaw in the former republics of the Soviet Union, so that today there are several frozen conflicts, unresolved for decades, in that vast territory. As in Transnistria, an unrecognized state, seceded from Moldova since 1990. Kolja is a silent witness of how borders and bureaucracy shape the lives of citizens, finally forced to lose their identity.

Patrick, 20-years-old, lives in Paris with his older boyfriend. He runs a teenage pornography website, which results in a prison sentence following a raid at a party. Mário, 8-years-old, was kidnapped 12 years ago in Portugal. Patrick and Mário are the same person with two conflicting identities: a life in Paris filled with parties, drugs, and promiscuity and a new rural life in Portugal, where he feels obliged to reconnect with a broken family.

In 1971, António Lobo Antunes' life is brutally interrupted when he is drafted into the Portuguese Army to serve as a doctor in one of the worst zones of the Colonial War – the East of Angola. Away from everything dear he writes letters to his wife while he is immersed in an increasingly violent setting. While he moves between several military posts he falls in love for Africa and matures politically. At his side, an entire generation struggles and despairs for the return home. In the uncertainty of war events, only the letters can make him survive.

Ramiro is a bookstore owner in Lisbon and a poet in perpetual creative block. He lives, somewhat frustrated, somewhat conformed, between his shop and the tavern, accompanied by his dog, his faithful drinking companions and his neighbors: a pregnant teenager and her grandmother recovering from a stroke. He would gladly continue living this quiet and somewhat anachronistic routine if events worthy of a soap opera did not invade his bubble.

All sympathetic magic is based upon two principles: the first called the Law of Similarity says that “likes produce likes,” or that an effect resembles its cause; the second, called the law of contagion or contact says that all things having been in contact with each other continue to react upon one and another at a distance even after they have been severed or disconnected. A fearful man meets a disquiet woman. Do you believe in magic?

Despite his age and general weariness, Gebo keeps on working as an accountant to provide for his family. He lives with his wife, Doroteia, and his daughter-in-law, Sofia, but it is the absence of João, son and husband, that worries them.Gebo seems to be hiding something, especially to Doroteia, who is anxiously waiting to see her son again. Sofia is also waiting for her husband to come home, and yet she fears him. All of a sudden, João arrives and everything changes.