Discoveries from Portugal World Cinema

Different attitudes towards love, loss, faith and searching for the sense of life, revealed by familiarity of four characters.

Luís hates Christmas. In the hospital where she is a doctor, she always offers herself to work for 24 hours in the emergency room on the 24th and 25th of December. When everything gets ready to be another bitter and solitary Christmas, a homeless is taken to the emergency room apparently with a pneumonia, despite refusing treatment. When Luís intervenes, she ends up recognising his father in the homeless man, with whom she cut relations circa 10 years ago.

A journey inside the tram crossing the city of Lisbon while listening to fragments of Fernando Pessoa's poetry.

As he learns his mother died, a man who had left for France to find a job and a living is now returning to Portugal. We follow his wanderings, the places he forgot. We feel the stranger he has become in the eyes of the other people. Gone long ago, he didn't know then he would lose everything. He has now to grieve his own way.

On January 19, 1982, Lilian lives her first disappointment. She is fifteen and after waiting for a long time, she realises that she has been abandoned. Lilian returns home alone and on her way she understands what pain is. On January 19, 1982, Elis Regina died at the age of 36. And the whole city understands what loss is. That day, Lilian and the city are the same.

The days in Lisbon are long, but the nights are longer. Two semi-legal migrants from Bangladesh waiting for their residency applications to proceed. They're stuck: they can't leave the country to go home or anywhere else. Maybe tomorrow, they'll get the call from the Portuguese Immigration Service, informing them that their applications have moved on to the next phase. Until then, they'll have the same old chat before heading to sleep, ready for another day.

This documentary follows a group of prison inmates as they prepare to perform the annual Easter ritual, the Via Crucis, with a community of villagers in the northeast region of Portugal. We witness, from the first rehearsal to the day of the procession, the solemn and surreal moments that lead convicts and members of a rural community to take real and symbolic communion together.

Too Fast Too Soon is a fashion film about the tension of fighting over something broken while the ones who broke it stay out of the conflict.

Wayne is a nice man who respects women. He smiles at them and caresses them with the same hand he later uses to touch himself while thinking about the obscene things he wants to do to them. Wayne hates being told no. But revenge is messed up.

A fiction based on true events, which happened at the end of the Federalist Revolution in 1895, in the south of Brazil. When Gumercindo Saraiva was killed in an ambush and buried at graveyard at some roadside, the legalists discovered it, unburied the body, and cut its head off so it would be taken to the Governor as a war trophy. Major Ramiro de Oliveira and two men were chosen for the unusual task. The film tells the saga of the Capitan Franciso Saraiva, son of Gumercindo, and his team of five riders in the attempt to recover his father's head. The moments of approximation and distancing between the pursued and the pursuers, the confrontation and the conflicts, the duels that happened on both sides until the final encounter, when there are only Ramiro and Francisco left standing; all these events are thoroughly narrated in the film. The lessons learned in the journey blossom at end and both men, due to everything they went through, decide for an honorable outcome for them both.

Carlos do Carmo's story is told by himself, a journey from his first recording at age of 11, with his own mother and father, to the Latin Grammys in Las Vegas. A story told with the help of family and friends such as Júlio Pomar, António Costa, Rui Vieira Nery, Pilar Saramago, Ivan Lins, among others. This documentary follows a year in the life of a man who reinvents himself in each moment.

After she found out about her unwanted pregnancy, Angelica lives a nightmare for seven months, in which instead of killing the fetus she languish herself, trying all sorts of abortion methods.

On an island untouched by humans, an orangutan is born and grows up, witnessing the rise, transformation, and fall of his home. Now the leader of his family, he fights for survival and his legacy, defying the elements to ensure a prosperous future for his family.

After a mysterious figure announces the arrival of Bad Times, a group of elderly people comes together to fight it with superstitions and popular wisdom. At the same time, Acácio, a lonely old man, deals with his memories and a personal vengeance.

The unbearable heat on the factory places us on the hottest summer days. A man who has been forced to leave everything behind tries to go to his daughter's birthday but receives threats from the court. In itself grows a wave of impatience, despair, violence. The violence not only of feelings but of things, materials, iron and metal, which deteriorate with time and the suffocating heat. In this industrial hell men merges with machines, they are near collapse.

It introduces a women's singing group from Alentejo, their testimonies about the periods of the dictatorship and the April revolution, and their experiences working in the fields before and during the agrarian reform. With the presence of the authors and the Viana do Alentejo Women's Choral Group.

An anxious boy, waiting for a friend to play chess with, finds a girl who listens to him and tries to calm him down.

An experimental short where a character sends a series of progressively desperate emails asking for a job.

Experimental movie that seeks the relation between art and madness.

The young Portuguese artist Rafa. is facing a turning point in his career, composing, recording and balancing roots and ambitions as he prepares to leave for Leeds and finalize his first EP.

Luana is one of a few children from an isolated community that lives without running water, electricity or easy access in Cabo Polonio, Uruguay. Through her eyes, we discover a world marked by the violence of the elements, anchored in the solitude of a collective movement still experimenting a social utopia. The wind, the sea, the sun, the endless sand and the animals form a landscape where life hangs on despite everything.

"Cabra-Macho" discusses the stereotype of the Brazilian Northeast as being a highly sexist region, picturing the everyday of transgenders in this environment.

"The Lurking Fear" interviews Portuguese citizens whose lives where hit by the torture of its fascist political police.

On January 22, 1961, a group of Portuguese and Spanish opposition movement members seized control of the Santa Maria, a Portuguese luxury cruise liner, an operation devised by Henrique Galvão to expose the Government of Portugal as a dictatorship.

A sensorial journey through the vibrant streets of Barcelona's Ciutar Vella, where time, space, and human presence intertwine in unexpected ways.

Mandragora Officinarum by director and visualist Tiago Pereira is a live video performance based on the fusion of religion, xamanism, and alternative medicine concepts. It unveils different fields of knowledge such as ethno-history, ethno-linguistics and ethno-botanic reinforcing the value of oral narratives, music and rituals in society. This post-cinematic event gathers samples of contemporary music and field recording on collective memory that deeps in dynamic and unconventional aspects of culture. The descriptions collected on popular beliefs, botanic and their contradictions with science and religion are put together with musical narratives aiming at new strings of creative thought that instigate and renovate today’s identity process.

Elsa returns to her homeland, Caldas da Rainha, in Portugal to meet her mother. Through this little adventure, we discover the city and the mysterious activities of its inhabitants, as well as elements of Elsa's family history. A crossed impressionist portrait is woven, temporalities become confused, and dreams mingle with reality.

Rosa, a recently single mother holds on to the idea of getting back with her ex. After a few public tribulations Rosa ends up locked in a room by him. Only to be saved later by a young neighbour, who will not only help her get out of the room but also to move on with her life.

Lisbon, on a winter day in 1994, between six and fourteen o'clock. A forty-year-old woman despairs in the last eight hours preceding the birth of her first child.

Two simultaneous events—the cutting down of a palm tree and the sound of a demonstration against austerity outside the Portuguese Parliament—become related, in unison, reflecting the present situation. While the trees are being cut due to the red weevil plague, that is affecting specific types of palm trees brought from African ex-colonies, the demonstrations against austerity are identified as the roots of economic crisis.

A trans* cook making a typical Brazilian plate, feijoada à brasileira.

One summer night, a teenage girl sneaks out of her house to meet a boy at a party. However, when she finds him, he is strange and distant. That same night and at that same party, a boy is intercepted by an unknown girl, who claims to know him.

The summer holidays take Inês to the house where she grew up. Recovering from a recent family mourning, we follow her return to the city she lives in. A heat wave follows her night walks.

It is winter and Jonah, a Brazilian immigrant, divides his time between working in a factory producing electric motors and car parts during the day and occasional sexual encounters with other men in his car at night. Little by little, monotony and uncertainty settle in, both in work and in encounters. What will be the end point for Jonah? What is the reason for this grey weather and the weight of the car, like an iron crust creeping through the night?

Rui Esteves is a thirty-something provincial doctor, praised for his human qualities towards the elderly and needy in a village where loneliness and abandonment are as much or more of a problem than illness and disease. When a controversial revelation exposes him as an impostor, Rui is removed from his position and forced to relive a past of pain and alcohol dependence.

This documentary shows a peculiar vision about theatre in general and O Bando in particular, on the bases of João Brites' directing the showcase of “ENSAIO SOBRE A CEGUEIRA” (essay on blindness), written by José Saramago.

Officer Tom Sykousky is a small town cop with a good heart and a short fuse - and his old flame knows exactly how to light it.

O Mundo dos Outros is a social experiment aimed at collecting various anonymous testimonials and stories. In this regard, our intention is to create a safe and welcoming space where it is possible to share any kind of personal testimonies and experiences, with the goal of creating an exhibition that celebrates all types of stories that happen every day, as well as sharing the experiences and perspectives we carry. This documentary features the stories told non-anonymously.

An essay about disaffection in 7 segments inspired by Stendhal's seven stages of love, "De L'Amour" (1822). Most people are afraid of love because they are afraid of their deepest joy, delight and inner freedom.

Beiras, 19th century. The rapturous fatalism and the love tragedy between Teresa de Albuquerque and Simão Botelho, who survives the intolerant dispute between their noble families. Emphasis on Baltazar Coutinho’s (Teresa’s cousin and suitor) lethal rivalry, on blacksmith João da Cruz’ unconditional protection, and on Simão’s submissive adoration for his daughter Mariana…

Five lives cross each other in the labyrinth of the suburbs in search of their redemption.

In the late 1960s, with the arrival of his bar-mitzvah, Michel was tasked with learning about his family's history.

The film is set in Lisbon, and tells the story of a day in the life of Rita and Paulo, a Portuguese young couple of the 90's. The fast changing city around them makes them wish to break with all traditions and live the day the get married (only civil marriage) like it is an ordinary day.