Red Desert Films

An old hostel, located in the center of Porto, served for many years as a hostel for people with few possessions, prostitutes and people passing through who made that place a more or less prolonged residence.

Filmed over six years in four countries: Portugal, Brazil, Colombia and United States, this romantic drama tells the story of Luzia, a Brazilian screenwriter, and Adrian, a Colombian actor, that fall in love during a film festival in 2009 and will live a fragmented love story while competing in different film festivals around the world.

In the late 70s and early 80s in the city of Porto, concerts by Rock and Punk bands began to appear. April 25, 1974, which put an end to the longest dictatorship in Europe, brought political and creative freedom. Through a series of tableaux vivants based on photos from an era covered with a nostalgic aura, but employing contemporary mannequins, the film revives some loud narrations of those crazy times, which failed to reach our ears.

As she goes through hills and rivers looking for Melusina, a mutant and legendary mermaid from the city of Luxembourg, where she grew up, the director talks to four women about their uncertain identities: what it is like to be an immigrant without being one, and to be a Luxembourgish without being one. A journey through memory in rainy weather. A search for ever-fragmented identities. An uncertain attempt at reconciliation. The memory of emigration from a contemporary perspective of a generation with a radically different relation to territories and displacements.

One day almost everything turned into a pile of rubble and bush. There remained ghosts wandering through the fields, the ruins and the fog. Some of these ghosts are alive. They are those who stayed, those who came back, those who roam the difficult memories of the most cursed neighborhood of the city. Only that this Tarrafal, the name of the field of slow death of Salazar's dictatorship, is not in Cape Verde but in Portugal.

In The Beach, the elderly return to active life, leave the spaces of suffering and loneliness to which they have sadly been inhabiting in contemporary societies. They have fun, play, swim, run. They go back to being people like everyone else.

The director questions his parents about their private life, past and present. They belong to a generation marked by misery and oppression, where marriage was "until death do us part". Although they are seen frequently together, they answer openly but alone. It's a portrait of identity, origin, memory - a stunning black and white intimacy.

A magical, vivid and poetic exploration of damaged human relationships. Nine passengers on a train must confront their fears, solitude and emotional emptiness.

In a remote village called Bostofrio, a young filmmaker breaks the law of silence in order to unearth the story of his grandfather. A series of awkward and funny interviews that reveal the secrets and half truths that are the fabric of rural Portugal.

Lilia, a Colombian citizen, has lived in eight countries around the world. Now, at the age of 67, she grows old alone in Portugal, caring for an Alzheimer's patient. The filmmaker asks her mother Lilia if she has found home and if she will ever return to Colombia, her native country she hasn't visited for the past 40 years. HOME is a personal-approach documentary about loneliness and the sense of belonging.

Edila Gaitonde, born in the Azores, was the first Portuguese woman to marry a Goan of Indian origin during the Salazar dictatorship. Her husband was Pundalik Gaitonde, a freedom fighter who fought for Goa’s independence from Portugal. Edila was a fighter, piano teacher, radio presenter, documentary maker. She left us in 2021 at the age of 100, but it is through her that we will learn stories about an unknown Goa and a forgotten Portugal based on her accounts, photographs and dozens of previously unseen super 8mm films.

The sound was deafening. The noise of the machines, the steps, the daily hustle of the more than a thousand workers, entering and leaving the shifts. There were 12-hour days, people without holidays, a stolen youth so that the cloth would continue to leave the factory. The revolution came and everything changed. Strikes, picket strikes, worker’s rights. Then the globalisation came. The factory went down to close. We went back to it, with the former workers, the old and the young. The machines continue to work in the empty spaces, the ghosts wander illuminated by traces of light until the walls begin to fall.

The past is difficult. The are people who live in the present with the difficulties of day-to-day and do not know what to expect from a future, more and more dark, for those who already have difficulties. There is a house, food, work. Now the future is very uncertain. Because of the crisis, they say. And tell this to who lives in crisis since it he recalls.

Almost 30% of the population of Porto lives in council districts. It is a special experience when districts become small towns with their own customs and traditions. However, they are also victims of stigmatization and bias. "Neighbourhoods" is a look at the reality of five council districts of Porto. From the eastern to the western parts of the city, we watch and listen to the inhabitants of those neighborhoods: Rainha D. Leonor, Cerco, Duque de Saldanha, S. João de Deus, Santa Luzia and Maceda.

Archival documentary about the most terrible piscatorial disaster possible.

A look at how the Troika's austerity programme for Portugal affected the lives of millions.