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.
How would it look like, the body of Dom Afonso Henriques, first king of Portugal, tutelary figure, subject to successive mythifications throughout Portuguese history?
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.
He was the most prolific within the New Portuguese Cinema generation. He would try western spaghetti, esoteric allegory, supernatural, and science-fiction. Without state subsidies, he would quit filmmaking in the 1990s. Who remembers António de Macedo?
In the course of one afternoon, Raphael's paradise turns into a spiral of guilt and paranoia.
On the phone in his dark bedroom, a man relives the end of a turbulent affair, while across town, the city burns.
A debate arises between Jesus Christ and a beautiful nun about her nightlife and whether the scriptures address any punishment for her sins.
The Red Market in Macao. The red tonalities of blood, flesh, buckets and even of the fish’s eyes, carry the audience into a strange and scary universe but also beautiful and intriguing. Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata’s camera emerges like a driving force giving us the exact balance between what exists and what we see.
Summer of 1982, a beach in the south of Portugal. Rui and his parents live closed in their worlds, blind to the failure that characterizes them as a family and condemns them to the malaise of survival. Rui will have school exams but he is only interested in music and in the exploration of imaginary worlds that he constantly sketches in drawings. Only Joana seems capable of pulling him out of his autism. The girl's vitality fascinates him.
Las calles could be regarded as a film about words, about describing and naming, about secrets and confessions, and about language as the matter of memory. In a dialogue between generations, young people are responsible for elaborating the question, and School is the place that tries to come up with a technique for it. In turn, the elderly answer through their stories, which are basically the story of the town. And like the word –which is always a fiction– builds a reality, the film sustains its tone on that intermediate area in which a fictional setting provides the conditions for the pure documentary genre to mark the pace and reach out to people.
Pedro gets home at dawn. Before the young boy falls asleep, his lonely mother drags him to the beach.
Cinderella escapes at midnight, leaving behind one of her glass slippers. In the days that follow, the gay prince can't give up the idea of completing the pair.
In a natural crisis scenario, the entire population of Azores is forced to evict due to an uncontrolled plague of hydrangeas, a common flower in these islands. Two young soldiers, bound to the beauty of the landscape, guide us to the stories of sadness of those forced to leave and the inherent desire to resist by inhabiting the islands. The filmic wandering becomes a nostalgic and political reflection on territorial belonging and identity, and the roles we assume in the places we came from.
China walks towards the Lisbon district of Martim Moniz. In its wake, the children shout: China! China! China will leave at dawn, will fly away. Just wants to be happy. But drinking her own poison without leaving a drop. Sometimes the air is laden with iniquity and purgatory is a kindergarten...
An elderly woman and a hormone-charged teenager arrive to a beach hut where, during her brief moments of clarity, she will persuade him to kill her.
Boy meets girl. The daily life of Dino and Helena is difficult and the grief is growing in a way that encloses them while they search for an urgent solution.
André's Eyes is an experimental docudrama in which the actual family members themselves participate in the recreation of their own story. Set in a small village in the Portuguese countryside, the film follows the struggle of a divorced father to keep his family together after his youngest son is taken away from them and placed in a foster family.
While a teenage boy learns how to drive, a woman walks her elderly dog through the woods. As the evening settles she realizes that it's not too late to take action.
