Discoveries from Portugal World Cinema

Evocation of the artistic and cinematic expression of 1960s and 1970s’ public television in Italy. It is the early age of public broadcasting, during which cinema also questions its relation to reality and video art emerges as an experimental answer. The character, a young female viewer, committed to exploring and trying out a new medium, carries us through time. Blurring the lines between document and creation, the film places the viewer between the early age period of television and the period of time she spends in the room, between memory and imagination, utopia and experimentation.

As she goes through hills and rivers looking for Melusina, a mutant and legendary mermaid from the city of Luxembourg, where she grew up, the director talks to four women about their uncertain identities: what it is like to be an immigrant without being one, and to be a Luxembourgish without being one. A journey through memory in rainy weather. A search for ever-fragmented identities. An uncertain attempt at reconciliation. The memory of emigration from a contemporary perspective of a generation with a radically different relation to territories and displacements.

Four cousins meet at grandma's house to argue about the heritage left by their recently dead grandpa.

Documentary about 4 large architectural landmarks that projected Portugal abroad.

This humorous animated short offers one possible answer to the philosophical question: what would life be like if I had never lived? The first half of the film follows a man from his conception to his funeral, focusing on the effect his life has on the people and events around him. The second half looks again at the same people and events, except now the man is not there - he had never been born. The differences will surprise you!

Along the day, we accompany Filomena, who works as a cleaning lady, through six different places.

A poetic film that celebrates the work of Alberto Pimenta, fruit of a friendship and complicity maintained during the last 24 years.

A young woman and her son runaway from their hometown to escape civil war. Nothing is left from the world they knew and the only thing they have is each other.

A night watchman spends time on a basketball court throwing a ball into the basket. He has become an expert. He shows his abilities to a simple janitor, who also like him, is there all night.

Across the country, many garages were emptied of cars to be filled with drums, basses, guitars, and amplifiers in the 1980s and 1990s. Before studios, often with no one really knowing how to play very well and without a plan, many bands started and ended in garages. What mattered was playing. Each decade has its own sound. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was that of alternative rock and its many variations. This is the story of the garage bands of Viseu, many of them local in scope, several reaching national dimension.

A strange golden insect crawls into a bedroom on a stifling summer night. As it invades the sleeping body, the walls begin to shift and pulse — and the nightmare begins.

Torin and his friends go look for a hidden treasure before they become too old for this kind of stuff.

During a distant future, Doanel Pauvres, a man of few words, is lodged at the last interplanetary cruise working, The Orca. During his stay, he coincidentally meets his former work colleague Stanley in the Casino. As the conversation progresses, it seems there is no coincidence in this meeting after all.

An animation that plays with the elements of the eclipse — light and shadow — and a poetic wait for a barber.

A short documentary that emerge at the center of round table debate, participating in it there's three students from the Superior School of Arts and Design, Caldas da Rainha - Portugal. This conversation go along with a video essay about Afrofuturism and Pop Culture. Also, during the debate, an interview with another student gives some real example of how afrofuturism can be applied when it comes to in taking control of the colonial narratives into a black person perspective.

Recorded in 1973, during the laborious attempt to issue his first album, one of Belchior's various appearances was in the TV Cultura's intimate program "MPB Especial". In it, a still very young, open and relatively angry Belchior (as in the testimonial seen at the end of the program) presented himself to the public through an autobiographical dialogue, proving that the new always comes.

The Portuguese choreographer Catarina Câmara believes she can help the rehabilitation process of the inmates by giving them contemporary dance lessons.

Alice, a woman with a fear of solitude and an exausting desire to change her life, develops an obsession for the doctor that accompanied her recovery after waking up from a comma. Between an over protective boyfriend and an undependable doctor, Alice faces a choice and the possibility of ending up alone.

Utopian symbolic playgrounds from memories are interconnected through sharp, flickering lights.

The story tells of the parallel lives of two sisters: Erica, in São Paulo, and Laura, in Stockholm.

The characters from a historical piece of art come to life to discuss poignant themes such as war and world peace.

In the mid-1940s, in a Portugal mired in poverty and illiteracy, a group of boys work in the potteries of Alhandra, on the coast, collecting clay to make tiles and bricks. Gineto, Sagui, Malesso, Guedelhas and Gaitinhas form strong friendships and bonds of camaraderie, while dreaming of other places and embarking on liberating adventures, facing the harshness of work, the daily dramas of family life, hunger, abuse and injustice with courage, rebellion and determination. In the end, their unity always prevails in a world of adults who do not understand them.

Jorge is a knife-sharpener. Despite being old and retired, he still keeps on working. Even health is not on his side, but this doesn’t seem to stop him. He drives down the streets with his motorcycle loaded with the trade’s tools day in and day out. Along the way he meets people he has known for years; he relives the past with them and looks concerned at the future, which seems to want to erase them.

Dominic, a conflicted soldier, tries to draw the line between what's right and wrong as he attempts to hunt down a creature.

In a neighborhood of the suburbs where avenges the law of the street, a group of teenagers will be required to overcome themselves and challenge their fears to conquer a place in the world.

Done in the style of an African folk tale, this film, a collaboration between European and African countries, is said to be among the most elaborate, high tech film in African film. Exquisitely photographed and filled with archetypal figures to create a poetic look at nature's revenge against those who would exploit her. It is set in the forest village of Amanha Lundju, a place where the birth of children is celebrated by the planting of a tree. The trees are considered spiritual twins. But for every tree planted, the rapacious state destroys many more for firewood and lumber.

It is the story of two men in love with the same woman and fighting each other in and out of the arenas of bulls.

Mesa Posta is a film that lives off the violence of a life, which is shown in the simplicity of the gestures of the person who plays it. The habits, beliefs and moments of this story are told in the act of setting the table, then the brutality of life is confronted by the beauty and the grace of the objects that make it: the table is set as life is told.

Bruna makes out with Andre before his trip to the beach. After that, she spends the rest of the day with her best friend Jota.

Tiago Guedes returns to Dennis Kelly, the British playwright with whom he has already enjoyed success in his dizzying descent into the depths of human complexity. After Órfãos, the director and stage director now tackles The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas, a 2013 text about the banality of evil in the person of the man that Kelly's play scrutinizes in retrospect: "Existence is not what you thought it was until now. It is not honest, it is not kind, it is not fair. Most of the world has no idea about this; they believe in God, or Daddy, or Marx, or the invisible hand of the market, or honesty, or kindness. They go through life with their eyes closed, getting beaten up and screwed over. He's like that. You're like that. But a tiny part of us, let's call ourselves the resistance, knows the true nature of life. The world is ours for the taking. We are powerful and rich and have everything, because we will do whatever it takes.

Eulália, a conservative Portuguese mother, found out that her son who emigrated to Germany has become Fostter Riviera, the internationally awarded first Portuguese gay porn actor. She suffers with the distance, sometimes toned down through the computer that has become her main source of information and communication with her son. This documentary focuses on the long journey of this mother towards acceptance and endeavour to get closer to her son.

Ramiro is a bookstore owner in Lisbon and a poet in perpetual creative block. He lives, somewhat frustrated, somewhat conformed, between his shop and the tavern, accompanied by his dog, his faithful drinking companions and his neighbors: a pregnant teenager and her grandmother recovering from a stroke. He would gladly continue living this quiet and somewhat anachronistic routine if events worthy of a soap opera did not invade his bubble.

Gabriel Abrantes and Alexander Melo deconstruct the 1st section of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew as a playful, vibrant ode to bacchanalia, classicism and homoeroticism.

Filomena lives alone in a rural village in the interior of Portugal and has just found out that she doesn't have much time left to live. Her granddaughter Laura, a young woman in her early twenties, raised by her, shows up out of nowhere at her house. They share memories of childhood and youth, up to the moment when the granddaughter left home to attend University in Lisbon. But something strange happens when the two have a heated argument about the possible return of Laura's mother to their lives. Is Filomena's illness playing tricks on her? Or is something else going on here?

1975, the year after the Carnation Revolution. Eduarda, João and Mick come from Northern Europe to work in the co-ops in the occupied farms of central Portugal. Like many others, they come to help with the land and the livestock, give medical appointments, family planning classes, show sexual education films and participate in the traditional dances. They bring a great deal of questions, but the “comrades from the South”, in turn, have more questions than answers.

The construction of the Castelo de Bode Dam began in 1945. By the new reservoir we now meet three women born in the 1940’s, who still carry out one of the most ancient human crafts – weaving. The mysterious and pathetic character of life, the events of the subconscious and the mutations of the environmental landscape intertwine with the loom’s back and forth.

Alternating Super-8, digital footage and the correspondence with her brother, the filmmaker evokes their deceased mother and the Portuguese revolution, which she only gets to know through these diffracted memories.

A family with financial difficulties has a brilliant idea: to make their daughter Lindinha get pregnant of the famous singer Ivan Cláudio to inherit a lot of money and get them out of the choke. They plan the right day that the girl should go out with the star and begin to follow his performance schedule. They just didn't count with one thing: the jealous Jennifer, wife of Ivan, who will not let this story cheap.

A child experiences the magic of carnival for the first time

A broken family gets together for Christmas dinner when their mentally ill daughter comes home for the first time since she was institutionalized.

The bride, the groom, the best man and a destructive passion. A wet dream turned into a nightmare. "La Dolorosa" is the second episode from "The Trilogy of Dream", an attempt by screenwriter/director Odilon Rocha to bring lyricism back to cinema.

Joana, fearing the dark and the sensation of being watched, faces a night of terror. As she battles her fears, she is consumed by the paranoia that something is lurking in the shadows. With every sound and every shadow becoming a threat, Joana struggles to keep her sanity as she confronts her deepest fears.

When three colleagues are about to say goodbye to each other and the house where they've been staying, tensions start to rise as revelations about them, and the house, emerge.

Portuguese short film by Gonçalo Santos.