Discoveries from Portugal World Cinema

Three decades after his second burial, Hungarian executed prime minister, Imre Nagy, is out of the grave again. In his wanderings through the streets of Budapest, Imre gets trapped. Hopelessly, he tries to find a way out; to die again. What is dead, will die again. Over and over. A city symphony with horses, pistols and a cowboy; a western film. A duel between "the image" and "the visual", inspired by Friedrich Schiller's "Das Lied von der Glocke".

A Nepali restaurant and its owner are melancholily waiting for customers to show up.

An intimate interview in YouTube with Cristina Mendanha, talking about her as a person and who she is.

A father finds refuge in memories created together with his daughter, who has been stricken with an illness. She has decided to keep her distance from him and they have not spoken for years. The film encourages her to reconsider her decision.

Images from my family archive remind me of a text by Borges. Little by little, I transform Averroes into my grandfather, my grandfather into Borges and Borges into me. In this movement, it becomes increasingly difficult to look at any of them without, too, glimpsing all the others.

"Ecos da Vermelha" shows the activities of the resistance to the Estado Novo (Portuguese fascist regime) in the city of Vila Franca de Xira, from the early 30's to 1974. Through the eyes of several witnesses that lived those dictatorship years, the film highlights the different initiatives and events that happened on those years on a political, social and cultural level, showing actions in the collectivities, the gathering in the taverns, the church's role and also some important events like the 1967 floods or the 1969 elections.

The Guadiana River, which forms the link between Portugal and Spain and serves as a powerful source of water supplying vital energy to the entire southeastern Iberian Peninsula, may soon dry up completely. Like many other rivers, its very existence has come under threat by climate change, which is also, in turn, leading to the demise of the rhythmic cadences that have resounded along this water flow for centuries.

After school, a group of children gathers at Casa de São Bento, where a community project is located and they have the freedom to dream, play and grow. Inside a time machine, they think about their future.

While trying to make a film that makes sense of home movies from her home country, Portugal, a filmmaker in the beginning of her career talks with other filmmakers in the hopes of understanding what it takes to make cinema out of archival images.

A look at the Alcochete invasion by a boxing coach under house arrest seeking redemption from his worst mistake. Four years later, the academic project remembers the media event, reflecting on the demonised agent of misinformation and sensationalism.

In 1972, haunted by dictatorship, a young Portuguese man wants to disappear and come back to life under a new identity. He joins the French Foreign Legion, and starts his instruction in Corsica. He is a good legionnaire. He feels he’ll lose his mind and escapes after 11 months. He wrote a letter to his mother every week. Somewhere in the 2000’s, a young boy plays in the garden of his dead grandfather. His mother plays with him, but she’s behind the camera. They discover the distance of time growing between them – everything changes. They discover the letters of the young man.

In the 11th century, there was a powerful and sensitive man, Al-Mu’tamid Ibn Abbad, whose personality became mythological. His life took place in the territory today divided by Portugal, Spain and Morocco. In the 21st century, a contemporary man undertakes the journey through this territory in search of the myth. As the journey unfolds, the traveler embodies the figure and personality of the poet king dialoguing with those he meets on the way, assimilating the issues that he struggled with, the feelings and contradictions he lived, questioning himself. Time is made of cycles. So are we.

Film by Maria José Silva

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.

Postal Fever launches a gaze through time and memory, crystallizing in collective and personal heritages. Putting into contact contemporary Super 8 images and family archives recorded on video, it tries to reflect – both critically and cryptically – on the nature of the images and their survival.

An animated 16mm film by JMG+PP.

A staged production shot in Maputo with the help of the Associação de Apoio aos Albinos de Moçambique. Persecuted throughout Africa the albino condition has a disturbing appearance of racial ambiguity which for the worst reasons has been the cause of suffering for a lot of people. Complexifying the racial a perception, Pedro and João create the awkward situation where 3 black albinos share jokes about the former colonial power in Moçambique, the Portuguese. Somehow what is staged here as a meta film, concerns a colonial phantasmagoria but is also a literal spin of the third man argument (TMA) Aristotle’s contestation of Plato’s theory of forms. If 2 men resemble each other, in order to be predicative as men, there would have to be a form of men, this form would have to be a man also, and it would follow that for that same form another on would have to exist and so on, on a infinite regression.

A body lies on the sand. Motivated by a small insect, it crawls until it reaches a dining table.

Several women in search of tenderness, love, and sex—with varying degrees of success, but always with humour. Their dates arranged through dating apps, in Buenos Aires, turned into an animated comic.

When his boss calls his name and he starts walking toward him, our protagonist begins to reflect on his boss's motives, going through several different scenarios, progressively further and further from reality.

The life, work, controversies, thought and cultural legacy of Portuguese poet Guerra Junqueiro

Non-Player Character - a film by João Brás

A kaleidoscopic postmodern collage odyssey, through several different films, set to the homonymous album.

João is an immaterial girl, refusing to be anything other than what she wants to be, regardless of her age, gender or race. When Tiago looks at her it’s like she’s always a different person. Literally. But when their relationship becomes too real, he will have to confront the prejudices that he doesn’t even know he has, to understand the world that she created for herself.

The purpose of this film is to discover largely unknown Macao. The ancient monuments, the statues of the discoverers, the modern buildings of the settlers’ quarter testify to the Portuguese presence, while the commentary states that the overseas presence is not built on domination but that it is “a cauldron of many ethnic groups, a new Portuguese civilization. Macao is Portugal”. Yet the film shows us that the true urban landscape of the city is Chinese.

This film shot in the south of Angola, is one of the few existing archival films of the time. It’s likely that the author filmed these images on command of Norton de Matos who was twice governor of Angola (1912-15 and 1921-24) and that we see in the image. A republican and mason, he was one of the promoters of colonial expansion in Africa, which began in the early 20th century, following the “pacification campaigns” – terrible wars – in Angola and Mozambique. He worked for the development of Angola and the settlement of Portuguese colonial settlers. The first part shows the opening of the trade and agricultural fair in the coastal city of Benguela. The atmosphere is very provincial Portuguese. Some Angolans walk through the frames; some are well-dressed – suits, hats – others are employees. Then a report on a Congress of Medicine and finally an aviation demonstration. It’s a promotional film about the development of southern Angola.

A short documentary directed by Francisco Dias.

Based on archive material, Manthia Diawara organizes an imagined dialogue between Léopold Senghor, one of the founders of the concept of Negritude, and Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The story of a group of teenage boys whose main interests are girls and sex. Kiko, secretly hides his homosexuality. This secret is challenged when Sara asks him out.

A good and hardworking man is married to a merciless woman who makes his life a living hell. Despite everything, a good presence is felt: Margarida, who works in the house and practically raised the couple's children, always cares for her employer’s well-being.

Abandoned neighbourhoods, a ghostly voice on the intercom, an impending eclipse and, above all, the contrails of the passing planes in the sky. In the everyday, (all too) human panorama of everyday life in present day Portugal, the artfully arranged sequences are captured in the magical reduction, and minor disturbances are always included.

Afecto shows the relationship of a homosexual couple who share the same space but no longer see each other. We talk about cutting, a disturbance that people cut themselves in the film, symbolized by the track and editing.

Icaro and Valesca are arrested after being caught selling chocolate bonbons. After being imprisoned for months, they try to get some control over their fates.