Discoveries from Portugal World Cinema

Where were you when you realized the irreversibility of death? From mourning, Alex retrieves the environment of her childhood and transforms memory into a space of performance for overcoming.

In August of 2017, a crew of Portuguese skaters hopped into a van and drove off from Porto, Portugal, heading towards the Balkans, without any concrete destination and seeking spots to skate on the way.

This subjective documentary tells the journey towards the home of Marie from Adana, an Armenian forcibly converted to Islam. It's a story of searching for roots and not finding them. From Adana's old Armenian memory sites to the diplomatic archives of Nantes (France) and to the disruptive searches of treasure hunters, Sweet Home Adana brings together the fragments related to different aspects of denial and forgetting.

There is a tradition in Paredes do Bairro that is unparalleled in the region, and perhaps even in Portugal: the digging up of the Pedra da Sesta on 25th March, the feast day of Maria Malandrona, and then burying it on 25th September, thus marking the beginning and end of the rural workers' sesta (nap).

Recorded and filmed in my room, in that order.

Based on Nina's final monologue from the play "The Seagull" by Anton Chekhov, this short film explores the relationship between a young actress with her job, her boyfriend, with the text and, especially, with herself. What really matters when we are acting? Or in a relationship? Or in the way we perceive ourselves?

On the first day of school, I asked him where he came from. He said he came from the USA, but he was from Orgal, a tiny village in the municipality of Vila Nova de Foz Côa. He was a funny kid. Over the years I lost track of him. Nine years later I met him in Lisbon. He was making a film, "O Fantasma". A great actor! Nominated for awards in Portugal and abroad. He couldn't handle the exposure. He totally decompensated. He died alone.

'Secrets of Nature' was a series of short films produced by the BBC in the 1920s and 1930s about animals, plants and our relationship to them. In 2021, and in tandem with the 'Cinema e Razão Ecológica' conference, Teresa Castro gives it a new reading in four episodes in which she explores the world of lichens, mushrooms and ruderal plants. An unprecedented mini-video series, produced by Culturgest.

A play by the Cidadela Theater Club.

The making of of a making of. The Shooting of a feature. An unpaid intern. One theft. One making-of. The first movie... maybe the last.

A film by Regina Guimarães

Directed by João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva

Alexandre experiences his first mourning with his uncle’s death. Not knowing how to deal with the pain of those who stay, he faces the situation in his own way.

An ethnofiction that accompanies a young woman who finds herself overwhelmed by the city setting out on a journey seeking refuge in the countryside.

A woman struggling with the constant pressure to change her lifestyle.

The film follows Monchique's distillers in the south of Portugal, more than the process it is a meditation on the mountain particular sense of length and time.

A group of designer friends decided to get together to uncover the forgotten history behind the walls of Júlio Redol's ceramic factory, in Caxarias (Ourém). After the research, the exhibition “Ao Redol da Tijomel” brings back all the grandeur that the factory was able to offer to Portuguese ceramics, supported by great industrial and social values. It is remembering, thinking and living about what was, what is, and what could become.

The encounter emerges as a snapshot of the end of a relationship.

From a human point of view, a mountain is a barrier and a place of passage. Mountains have always been natural frontiers between territories. Nuno Escudeiro collected stories in Briançon, in the French High Alps, and in the Susa Valley, in the western part of Piedmont, and to these he added home movies from the Superottimisti Archivo di Film di Famiglia.

Ethnographic film

Two suits keep pushing each other with a rope that ties them together.

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

On the island of Tanegashima, the director of the film who is also Portuguese follows the story of the first encounter between Japan and the West. Observing that the gestures of the Portuguese and Japanese today copy the gestures from the past.

Cinema viewers, viewers of themselves and of a city whose portrait is born from both memory and present time. Port(o) of a cinema history of a place and country but also of a changing world.

The filmmaker films the last moments before she is evicted from the house in which she has been living for many years. The camera serves as the guide in this process of mourning, building an archive of the house, the neighbourhood, the people that lived there or the ones that visit.

In imperial Russia, Pjotr goes to civil war at the age of 15 to defend the Tsar. While the bolsheviks gain ground he deserts on horseback, leaving behind his mother and brothers. After three years without news from her son, his mother thinks Pjotr is dead until she receives a letter from him. On exhile, Pjotr reads his mother’s letters while he tries to detach from former motherland. This family is revisited through the eyes of Pjotr’s granddaughter, Aya, intertwining facts and dreams, times and generations.

The real story of Maria José's first years of marriage, where she left Porto to live near her husband while he was in the army.

Short film directed by Raquel Medeiros

In the quiet town of Ponte de Lima, two young criminals rob a tavern in order to obtain money to support their lives of alcoholism and decadence.

On February 4, 1961, armed militants attacked the prison and administration posts in Luanda, the capital of Angola; a brutal repression against black populations ensued; at the same time, the long strike of cotton workers in the east of the country was crushed, with napalm bombing. On 15 March, northern bakongos attacked properties and villages, killing hundreds of Portuguese and Angolan with machetes. The independence movements MPLA and UPA supported these actions. Salazar, Head of Government, granted the Defence portfolio and announced his decision to send troops to Angola and STAY in Africa.

In the Southern region of Portugal, the Algarve, you find a surprisingly sweet and juicy orange, considered one of the best in the world. But, production is plagued by commerce, monoculture, and the use of pesticides. This presents an immediate danger to all life around it. A growing movement of organic farmers promotes a feasible and sustainable solution that could ultimately position the Algarve as one of the leading organic orange farming areas in Europe.

Encouraged to talk about what they watch on television, workers at the Santana Mill give their testimonies on the subject. One interviewee emphasizes the importance of being filmed and seeing herself on the screen. The opening of Globo's telenovela Selva de Pedra is repeated several times and some scenes from the plot are shown. Other scenes from Globo: Jornal Nacional, the American series Duro na Queda, and the opening of Fantástico. Man uses tractor battery to turn on TV. In the end credits, the director comes on stage and records her image handling pictures of the interviewees. The credits are presented "inside" a TV set. A TV set "planting" on the floor turns on the opening of the soap opera.

Record of the importance of Confeitaria Colombo in cultural life from the beginning of the century, in Rio de Janeiro, to the present day.