Discoveries from Portugal World Cinema

Short film about the large fishing boats used in coastal Portuguese villages, rowed by 30 or 40 men and needing oxen to bring their nets out.

Prima and Lebsi are two young Afro-descendant women who grew up on the outskirts of Lisbon, daughters of immigrants who occasionally meet at a house party, on Cousin's birthday. Lebsi dates Rave, a young street dancer who makes a living dancing in the streets of central Lisbon, and they have a daughter in common. Prima is an orphan of both her father and mother and learned to let go of herself very early on. She lives alone with a cat and found selling cannabis as her alternative to generating money and paying the bills. Still, she is also a respected beat producer in the neighborhood. Both want to improve their lives, they dream of getting out of the “zone” but in the meantime they are living as best they can, asserting themselves in their way.

In the microcosm of a fragment of a resin sculpture, we observe fossilized eucalyptus leaves. The suspended still life, where we think we see specters of a world-image, is demystified by the sound of the tumultuous Cure.

Ethnographic film

Melgaço, Parada do Monte. The memory of a chance encounter on the border between the real and the imagined, the affection and superstition, has been passed down from generation to generation.

Each year the salt pans are harvested to receive salt mountains. Water, mud, wind, sun and man are the elements that produce the emerging salt.

In a small studio we unveil the nature of the creative process of João Gabriel, a young promise of Portuguese contemporary painting. A work marked by the presence of the male figure and the sexuality of pornographic films from the 70's and 80's. Transgressing the boundaries of pleasure and navigating through new experiences of desire, in a joyful rebellion where João Gabriel’s paintings invite us to delve in.

In A Straight Story, a train journey between Poznań and Lublin, in Poland, becomes an intimate and cinematic photo-filmic essay on memory.

Alexandrina is a Portuguese truck driver who works alone delivering goods across Europe. During these long journeys, her only connection to other people is through the Internet and phone calls. The feeling of being trapped inside a metal can on wheels begins to suffocate her. 42.ZE.66 is a portrait of this strong woman and recounts the struggles of a lonely life on the roads of Europe.

Collection of reports related to Rio de Janeiro.

Part of the "I Love My Label" documental project dedicated to independent music labels from Portugal.

Jonas dialogues with a artificial intelligence that makes him question his trajectory.

The painter Ana Marchand always felt a bit dislocated in her family. The love of art and travel, where did she get those from? As a young woman she saw a travel book written by her uncle Maurizio Piscicelli and finally understood. Catarina Mourão follows Ana’s familiar and spiritual journey. Who was Maurizio? Who is Ana? The face of one, the face of the other. Reincarnation are the several lives we live.

In mid-summer 2011, Paulo Carneiro and set out as assistant director for a film crew working on a project on the west African coast. There he unexpectedly ended up shooting his own film, a documentary report about a sinking ship near the coast of Guinea-Bissau on which he was a passenger. The digital camera records the growing panic on the ship after it has gotten stuck in the ocean in an oppressive nighttime atmosphere. In shaky interview footage, we see passengers move from an initial apathy to nervous anxiety, and from there fluidly to a fear for their lives. The growing tension on board is reflected in the film's ever quickening tempo.

In a world where iron and land mix themselves creating unexpected cities, the wind blows life among leaves in the eternal rebirth cycle. This is the wind’s embrace.

At the National Archive of the Moving Images in Portugal, archivists discuss the powerful bond between people and a machine that preserves a very delicate medium.

Carrotrope is a new optical toy. It represents the cyclic movements of life. Meanwhile, a man drinks and the time passes at 24 frames per second.

A documentary about Álvaro Siza Vieira in Cape Verde and his project to restore the old town of Ribeira Grande, the first city to be built by the Portuguese in Cape Verde on the island of Santiago in 1462.

Private Tango is the result of complicity between the interpreters and the camera. The movements initially choreographed adapt and reinvent themselves in an improvisation where the camera also becomes her interpreter.

The boundaries between memory, dream, and reality blur, leaving only the sensation of something once known, now slipping away.

In this film, Ariadne, still a young adolescent, climbs to a mountain in the island of Crete to meditate about a strange dream. The daughter of King Minos, still didn't meet Theseus, and she neither knows about his existence, but in her dream about a bullfight she thinks to recognize the figure of the hero in the strange character of the bullfighter.

A film essay about the form of cinema. Over the course of several months, Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela collected visual testimonies of various labour and ludic activities and other daily practices rooted in empirical knowledge. Establishing intuitive relations between concrete gestures and substances, sensorial experiences and analogical thinking, the authors have created a fragmentary film immersed on the idea of transformation of matter, generating a revolving movement that metamorphoses itself over time. Throughout a sequence of diverse quotidian activities, solutions and abilities the spectator is conducted over a series of connections in a game of interplay between forms of magic, pleasure, geometry, symbolism and labour.

Documentary depicting the information and awareness about the presence of "isolated" indians in the indigenous land Kaxinawá of the Humaitá River, on the frontier of Acre with Peru.

For women, this is happening all over the world, every single day. This is their horror story.

1960 is a home movie recorded as a super 8mm logbook. Based upon Diário de Bordo by Fernando Távora, its goal is to revisit the journey the architect made in 1960.

The story of this film is based on actual facts, the murder of actress Maria Alves, and the investigation that ensued, covered by Reinaldo Ferreira himself. Ferreira also wrote a novel based on the same facts.

A mortician and two helpers look for a man who died for his funeral. A road movie through the mountains of northern Portugal. Who lives in these places now? Why are they still living there? What Time is theirs? What secrets do they keep? It will be a service for a long journey.

A student appears to be showing her best side, trying not to reveal what's going on underneath her mind. In the end, she runs to a place where the only person she faces is herself. She makes a final decision, all by herself, and everything remains the same.

Inspired by a true story, the film depicts the last days of a known folk figure of the streets of Aracaju... Madona. It is a party day and the city needs to hide its dirt.

Three men wash ashore in a forgotten cove, where time seems to have stood still. Surrounded by volcanic rocks and tides, they find themselves confined in a place as beautiful as it is inhospitable. As the days go by, a strange presence begins to insinuate itself among them.

In a small hill near the village of Gerês, called Penedo da Freira, lies a tombstone that appears to mark a site of passion between a Portuguese nun and a Spaniard soldier near the end of the 18th century. The legend described in the stone becomes a target of obsession for a young director as he plunges two actors into reliving its words.

In her visual essay, Leonor Areal invites the viewer to look in detail at a centenary film and at the dozens of people who appear after a concert, most of them men, in full suits and hats, many with mustaches. Among them, the poet Fernando Pessoa is sought.

A film that scrutinizes the idea of “soft racism” and how it comes to drink from the exalted Portuguese colonialism. The titular Rosinha is a Guinean native who became the symbol of the first Portuguese colonial exhibition presented by the Estado Novo in 1934. A trip to the past to better understand the present.

An experimental fabulation about the Fairies' Tree. This tree is mentioned several times in Joan of Arc's trial. Imagining it multiplied in space and time, this film ritualizes this historical element, reappropriating it and turning it into a symbol of gender dissidents prosecuted by the Inquisition.