1979. Flicking through pictures from a Soviet magazine, 15-year-old Martim dreams of building a new society. His radical communist parents send him to study at Astrakan for one year. In her new film, Catarina Mourão captures with tremendous precision the moment a middle-aged man passes his story on to his son, thus shedding the taboo of his ineffable experience.
Just released from prison, Léa returns home to the Brasilia favela of Sol Nascente and joins up with her half-sister Chitara, the fearless leader of an all-female gang that steals and refines oil from underground pipes and sells gasoline to a clandestine network of motorcyclists. Living in constant opposition to Jair Bolsonaro’s fiercely authoritarian and militarized government, Chitara’s women claim the streets for themselves as a declaration of radical political resistance on behalf of ex-cons and the oppressed.
From our window one can see a set of the film The Green Years, directed by Paulo Rocha in 1963. This was our starting point: guided by Rocha's gaze, we look back at the places of that film. The successive geological, urbanistic and social strata of Lisbon, besieged by the pandemic that interrupted the shooting, are drawn out in front of our camera, like a contemporary jazz impro from a score written in 1963.
In 1974, after years of civil war, the Portuguese and their descendants fled the colony of Angola where groups working for independence gradually claim their territory back. A tribal girl discovers love and death when her path crosses that of a young Portuguese soldier. Meanwhile, another group of Portuguese soldiers is barracked inside an infinite wall from which they will have to escape once the past comes out of the grave to claim its long-awaited justice.
The afternoon Jorge asks Mariana over for a weekend at his house in Leiria, she starts to see him in a whole new light. Unsure of her friend’s intentions, Mariana accepts his unexpected and baffling invitation.
In 2020, unable to travel, Ico Costa left a small camera with Ailucha and Domy, two young Mozambicans from the city of Inhambane, and asked them to film their daily lives. The result: working, playing, walking, hanging around, smoking, listening to music, singing, dancing, feeling desire – being teenagers.
Atlas of an amateur cinema focuses on films that were made outside of professional networks and, in most cases, for emotional reasons: amateur films and home movies that have been neglected by history and archives, locked away in private places. It includes conversations with Amarante Abramovici, José Manuel Costa, Melissa Rodrigues and Teresa Castro.
