Real Ficção

Film adaptation of "The letter from the hunchback to the locksmith" by Fernando Pessoa's heteronym Maria José.

Fernando Lemo's world is fiercely stripped of any external logic, as Jorge de Sena once said. His artistic gesture blends with his own existence, where the poetic principle comes first. And with the light that insists to come through the half-closed door, the fear of life is vanquished in the battle fought with death. Thus, each word is born within another word and each image within another image. Out of how many knives is love made, the poet wonders?

This documentary shows a peculiar vision about theatre in general and O Bando in particular, on the bases of João Brites' directing the showcase of “ENSAIO SOBRE A CEGUEIRA” (essay on blindness), written by José Saramago.

Departing from extracts written by Fernando Pessoa, the characters walk through the city of Lisbon, having the streets and houses where the Poet lived as the background.

Documentary by Rui Simões, which celebrates the 20th anniversary of Expo 98, one of the biggest exhibitions that Portugal hosted

The story of a homeless man and his journey.

The paths of pain are populated by men and women of all ages, suffering from lack of affection, lack of money, mental problems, alcoholism and drug addiction, or they are simply people who have come to Portugal in search of a life that is a little better. On the other side of this path there is a veritable anthill of volunteers, social welfare workers and different technical assistants who construct and maintain support structures, some of them thinking of better days, and others institutionalising this help without believing that the phenomenon can be cured.

50 years after its beginning, it's still a delicate and hermetic subject today, based on an exclusively male speech, as if veterans were war's only owners and victims. When a country is at war though, is there anybody left out? Warriors is a generation's war movie, told by those who were left behind to wait, those who chose to be there and those who ran to rescue the soldiers from the battle's front lines. A female insight on war.

Documentary about "Madrugada" show: On the eve of 25th of April, 1999, took place at Praça do Comércio, in Lisbon, the performance of "Madrugada", a creation of the Theatre O Bando, commissioned by the Lisbon city council to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the "April Revolution".

This documentary follows a group of habitants from Cova da Moura neighborhood into a journey to Cape Verde, to celebrate St. John festivities. Recovering the rituals and rhythms of these festivities, the cape verdean people living in that neighborhood near Lisbon, try to recover their roots and transmit it to their children.

Júlia is a 16 year old teenager. A sudden emergency hospital commitment helps her realize, although reluctent, that she suffers from a serious desease: nervous anorexy. Her recovery is slow, but she can count on the support from both her friend, parents and the psychologist.

How would you react if you couldn't see? In rehearsing the theatrical adaptation of "Blindness", by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, the company "O Bando" made the experience. The actors lived 24 hours blindfolded in an abandoned hospital. How would you react if you could see again?

Fiction is never very far from reality. A young man, of Portuguese heritage, decides to do a PhD based on the documentary The Good People of Portugal, a work from 1980, also directed by Rui Simões. This opens the door to a parallel between the reality of the film we see and that of PREC, the moment of the studied documentary and the contemporary world, with the young Michel in between.

Frei Gualter is sent by S. Francisco de Assis to Guimarães around 1213. The devotion to this franciscan friar started to rise and in 1577 the brotherhood of S. Gualter is created. The Gualterianas are celebrated since 1906, the new way of celebration in honor of their patron.

In 'Os Fotocines', an intimate portrait of the war is built with those who lived it. This documentary feature film aims to investigate who were those, that in the Portuguese colonial war, lived with the simultaneous responsibility of fighting, defending their own lives and also, of permanently recording that same collective mission, through cameras and shooting, as well as screening.

Built in the New State to control the overseas students, the House of the Students of the Empire, situated in Lisbon with delegations in Coimbra and Porto, was fundamental in the fight for independence of the Portuguese colonies. Future leaders of the Liberation Movement, like Agostinho Neto and Amílcar Cabral, passed through this meeting point. The documentary The House restores the memories of the testimonies of the survivors of the House, fictionalizing in parallel excerpts of Pepetela´s “The Generations of Utopia”.

Founded in 1974, O Bando has known how to grow artistically. From an initial project, almost exclusively dedicated to a younger public, it developed the idea of a community theatre where different generation can meet. O Bando tries to find the anthropologic roots of our imaginary and tries to create poetic visual, at a risk accepted by the experimental contemporary art.

With this trip, an intergenerational sharing begins: with Portugal present as a backdrop, the director and a little daughter wander as if in question, trying to understand the country of today.

100,000 Portuguese young men left for war in the countrie's former colonies. In the same period, 100,000 fled the country so as to not be part of that war. What was the former's role in shaping Portugal?