Discoveries from Portugal World Cinema

A documentary about the life and "work" of the father of the Portuguese far-left.

Airplane takeoff, flight and landing.

Born in a body that we don’t feel like ourself is a big challenge that anyone is not prepared for. However, the willpower to feel good and complete is the key to overcoming any obstacle. Filipe, a 21 years old transsexual boy, is this force of nature that was born to inspire us all, transgender and cisgender. With an open heart, he tells us about his process, while showing us a little bit of his day-to-day.

After another monotonous, tiring and repetitive day of class, two students from a school on their way home, start a conversation at the bus stop to reflect on whether what they do at school and in their everyday life is really useful, and how long will daily repetitiveness be present in our lives and will everything we do generate results in the future or is everything we go through just a waste of time.

This work refers to the progression, regression, and evolution of time. It alludes to the idea that while time moves forward, bringing change and advancements with it, it also moves backwards, erasing the potential for new experiences. Pedro Maia experiments with the use of automatic learning algorithms to create a replica of the past.

A lonely woman (played by the director's own mother) begins the process of adopting a seventeen-year-old girl, who in turn cares for a ten-year-old boy.

A lighthouse keeper, his work, and the purpose (or lack thereof) of a profession devoted to solitude.

Ethnographic film

A filmic essay that relates the aesthetic representation of dinosaurs with the history of capitalism, with the dinosaur as a figure of the imaginary that is shaped according to political ideologies, concepts of power, gender and extinction.

The story of the voyage of the first Portuguese ship that landed in Japan in 1543.

Film by Maria José Silva

A Bird spies the pain of the world, silenced by the sphere in which it confines itself. Fruit of freedom's essence, but without possession of it, the pair of wings takes comfort in the shadows that dance between the cycle of life. After a tempting debate with his own reflection, the bird conquers the skies, judging himself free at last. But would that freedom be free? Or an even bigger cage?

A journey that makes us question what is happening to our planet and what we can still do for it.

A short documentary directed by Francisco Dias.

A woman projects an ideal lover onto a series of anonymous sexual encounters, attaining spiritual transcendence in the process.

A dive into sexual identity and its implications from the external expectations of how each individual must fulfill their role in a society guided by compulsory heteronormativity.

Miguel is not a character, Miguel is the representation of uncertainty, discomfort, doubt. The story is guided through the reflection of a young man who seeks representation of his own universe in undefined spaces, people, moments and corporeities, like himself. Exposing an uncomfortable and doubtful body, which wanders between notions of presence and absence in order to find its own definitions and ways of existing, works as a discursive and expository political act of an invisible and undervalued reality.

Through testimonials from Mozambican women, the filmmakers explore the symbolism and social, cultural, and economic implications of the capulana in the female universe, in different eras, linked together by the features, colors, patterns, designs, sayings, and names of each capulana, in whose folds a unique, singular story is hidden.

Iroko is a black trans man and artist who has in his daily life the challenge of meeting society's expectations while trying to deal with his internal conflicts configured in fear, anxiety, panic crisis and depression.

A jazz jam over old photographs.

Quarantined in an isolated location, a young couple must confront the future between the two after a mysterious incident.

Like haikus, each sequence seeks to make the viewer think and feel about it, so Hotel should be watched like poems in the dark.

Magic as contemplation through distortion. An investigation of the Tarot and other mystical symbols in search of images occult to common perception.

Long before tech giants Google and Apple came to dominate Silicon Valley, one visionary company ruled the digital economy: Atari. How did it take off, and what led to its eventual downfall?

Images of Los Angeles in the 1970s and a subsequent takeoff from LAX airport give way to Portela, where internationally renowned actress Julieta Pipi has just arrived in Lisbon. Miss Pipi prepares for a tense press conference to be held at her palace on the outskirts of the capital. Faced with questions that are sometimes political, sometimes intellectual, and sometimes even sexually inquisitive, Pipi defends herself, with an Italian accent (influenced by the last film she shot in Italy), against all provocations, even sidestepping impertinent questions about her dramatic training. With the conference setting the tone, the film operates a sequence of flashbacks that introduce us to her work and past glories.

The presence of a sinister figure in Bruna's childhood, generated a trauma that she was not able to overcome even after being an adult. Was this creation just the result of Bruna's imagination or was this nightmare closer to reality than she imagined?