Discoveries from Portugal World Cinema

The story of an island populated by the weirdest people in the world, where nobody has a job. Pinduca, a Fakir, arrives to the island and becomes a magician, but also begins to lose his sanity.

K’Ayo is the most famous artist of his planet: he plays the piano like no other, his creativity is endless. But where does all this inspiration come from? That is the big mystery.

In June 2016, a girl bought a tomato plant. As there were no cherry tomato plants available, she had to buy a regular tomato one. Even though she knew the pot was small, the tomato plant lived his whole existence in it, until October of that same year, in apparent independence and indifference. Against all odds, the tomato plant managed to blossom and bear one fruit, just the one tomato.

Adaptation of the eponymous tale by Loureiro Botas.

The West is not a primitive realm simply because the Sun sets there. But if it were primitive, an imaginary tribe could adopt the spell of Cinderella's shoe as a mating ritual. Indeed, the less often you are chosen, the more your hoped-for partner becomes a Messiah, a ghost of Prince Charming. In any case, if there isn’t such thing as a generalized cold war between male and female, there is at least a wall separating the mythic elements that define the genders: a kiss is a form of eternity as deceitful as that which brings together the Sun and sea.

Maria Filomena Molder takes from a bookcase a small notebook that she used to copy by hand all of Rimbaud's letters.

Memories of youth. Homage to the super 8 film Plus X, that was extinct by Kodak in 2010.

In the 1980s, the Kibe Lanches restaurant, in the Pina neighborhood of Recife, sold Arab cuisine. On Friday nights, it became a joyful meeting place, whose main attraction was 'Rolinhas do Barão'.

A meditation on the human form and its many representations over the centuries, this archaeological essay compiles images of statues, photos, sketches, and news clippings from Portugal’s Jose de Guimarães International Arts Centre. The filmmakers conjure a slipstream of interrelated origin stories via brief bits of narration and tableaux of various animal and mineral elements.

A study of gestures, light and sounds from within a house in Lisbon, during a regular spring afternoon.

Two men are subject to unexplained forces of nature when they decide to stop the machine.

Hypocrisy, violence and corruption in Brazil's 2016 political crisis.

Benfica - Torino 4-3 is a movie about the last match of this Torino team as, on their return trip back to Torino, the plane crashed killing all on board.

LGBTQ+ asylum seekers in Belgium face an impossible ask: prove their identity by reliving the worst things that have happened to them. For people who have hidden their queerness their whole lives just to survive, the asylum process demands the opposite: total openness, total detail, to complete strangers. Red Elephant follows those caught in this cruel contradiction, many of whom have fled deeply conservative, homophobic societies only to encounter a system that requires them to narrate their most painful experiences as evidence. The film gets close to the reality of what this process feels like; the waiting, the vulnerability, the absurdity of turning personal identity into a bureaucratic checkbox. Red Elephant is a powerful story about what gets lost when the price of safety is exposing the very thing you were taught to hide.

Gil learns to control his dreams with the help of his boyfriend.

In Ace, two friends live on opposite banks of the Tagus River, bound by a closeness that begins to reveal itself as something else. Amid this encounter, one of them discovers a feeling that has yet to be named. The film explores this latent passion through subtle gestures, in which every detail carries hidden meanings and suggests more than it reveals, building an atmosphere of anticipation and suspense. (Liedson Carvalho)

Tonight we move, unaware that the dead still live here and our children forever sleep in the bedrooms they were born. Go down ahead. Give me a moment to hear my own footsteps in these empty rooms.

This film celebrates the life and work of Zurita de Oliveira — musician, performer, composer, and author — widely recognized as the pioneer of rock & roll in Portugal. She turned music into an act of defiance, forging a path at a time when there was little room for free-spirited women. Through songs and testimonies, the film reclaims her memory and transforms her previously unheard lyrics into a gesture of resistance, sung and performed by the women of today.

This documentary has as main objectives to inform the public about the feminine's transformism that was made in Portugal, as well to be a tribute to the life and work of Betty Santos, the only Portuguese Drag King alive at the time.

Short film made alongside Máscaras (1976).

The story about a student who is hunted by the voices of her classmates.

Lana Del Rey live at Primavera Sound Porto on June 7 2024

The artist NBC presents, for the first time, the short film EPílogo. Directed by Chris Costa, this work explores issues related to the role of memories in the construction of identity.

Second short film by José Álvaro Morais.

First film directed by José Álvaro Morais.

Portuguese Cobblestone is one of the biggest symbols of Portugal culture: is an icon of engineering, pride and a stone in the shoe of urban mobility.