Discoveries from Portugal World Cinema

While the young captains lead the revolution in the streets, the people of Fontainhas search for Ventura, lost in the woods.

A young woman, working as sales-girl at a shopping center's music shop, wants someone with whom to share her secrets. A distant mother separating from her father, an aunt who emigrated to France, and her pre-adolescent sister, can't do - neither the boyfriend. Such a confident arrives unexpectedly - but then there are three of them, one too much. One leaves, but then another young man arrives, and there are three again. One must go. A sad young adult love story, told in the first person, singular - and ultimately alone, under the rain.

Orphaned by father and mother, Clara has always dreamed of building a singing career. At the age of 16, she moved to Belo Horizonte, where she won the ABC Golden Voice contest. In 1966, she recorded her first vinyl: A Adorable Voice by Clara Nunes. The approach to samba made her achieve the longed for success, in addition to international repercussion. Clara Nunes revolutionized the music industry, becoming the first woman to break the barriers imposed by the record label.

Hamburg, Germany, 1939. Getting a passage aboard the passenger liner St. Louis seems to be the last hope of salvation for more than nine hundred German Jews who, desperate to escape the atrocious persecution to which they are subjected by the Nazi regime, intend to emigrate to Cuba.

Every night, in danger of being beheaded, Scheherazade tells King Shahryar unfinished tales to continue them the following night, hence defying his promise of murdering his new wives after their wedding night. Scheherazade tells King Shahryar her stories but these are not those in the book. As in the book, these stories are tragic and comical, with rich and poor, powerless and powerful people, filled with surprising and extraordinary events.

Eloi, a paunchy middle-aged man, finds Samuel, a young sad sack, about to kill himself by plunging into the sea. Eloi takes Samuel under his wing, giving him a hot meal and bringing him to a seedy night club to introduce him to Esperança, who is said to be the most beautiful sex worker in Lisbon—and is also Eloi’s daughter.

On 18 September 1929, José Régio sent a letter to Alberto Serpa expressing his desire to create a production company and start making films. For almost 90 years, nothing more was known: no reply was ever found and Régio never mentioned the subject again. The discovery of some old reels in a collector’s hoard seems to provide the ending to the story.

The world of Arthur suddenly was taken by assault by two strangers. Incapable to recognize the two figures presented in front of him, Arthur is trapped in his own chair. A delicate situation, where the intensity increases gradually to it's boiling point.

Nineteen-year-old Julio heads to Lisbon from the provinces and gets a job as a shoemaker for his uncle Raul. But when he meets Ilda, a confident young housemaid who becomes a regular shop visitor, his working-class values collide with the bourgeois trappings of modern life.

At the end of the nineteenth century, an army force led by Major Mouzinho de Albuquerque, a cavalry officer, imprisoned in Mozambique the tribal chief Gungunhana, who had rebelled against Portuguese government and sovereignty. Mouzinho instantly becomes a national hero but his raising popularity worries the State.

An adaptation of the short story with the same name by Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz.

A man and a woman share their musings on love and freedom one summer night. The couple’s conversation meanders through memories, unspoken desires and passion through poetic dialogue.

A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the convent. These rather ironic paradoxes turn this fairytale into a philosophical fable.

One night, the phone rings in a traditional Portuguese snack bar from the country side. The Spanish Civil Guard is looking for Kunta. He isn't there and till he arrives people speculate about those phone calls and about who is that man. His he a thief? A terrorist?

1909. Miguel, a young teacher, is destined for a small mountain town on the border between Spain and Portugal: Lobosandaus, an inhospitable place, inhabited by distant people with remote traditions. It doesn't seem like the ideal place for someone like Miguel, who is determined to spread light and knowledge among his students. But reason cannot overpower desire, and as winter progresses, Miguel feels the darkness take over everything around him while his fascination with the enigmatic Dorinda grows. The unexpected death of an inhabitant will have a big impact on the city and will open the doors to a strange and ghostly presence.

While cleaning her childhood home, a girl comes across a mysterious box that strangely communicates with her, appearing to know her more than expected.

Touching, growing, caring, dancing. Seedlings climbing around fingertips, birds morphing into humans. But the tender touches slowly fade as the shadows grow and the witches of the forest start to disappear. Rooted in patriarchal violence, history keeps repeating itself.

In 1918, Maria Adelaide Coelho da Cunha, heiress and owner of the Diário de Notícias, leaves the social, cultural and family luxury in which she lives to escape with a petty chauffeur, 26 years younger.

The story of the CEO of a recently privatized company.

When a game night turns into a challenge, Pedro decides to take matters into his own hands and find the right gallery for his paintings.

Tiago, a tour guide with a broken heart leads Karen, a grieving and aging Brazilian woman, around a Lisbon of strange suicidal heroes. Tiago lives with his father, Raul, an old sailor haunted by historical defeats, and with his son, Manuel, a teenager fantasising of a solitary, but erotic, trip to the cosmos. All together, they take Karen through dreams, lost glories, and catastrophes to meet a fallen hero who disappeared many centuries ago on an island in the South Atlantic Ocean.

Joana lives in a small and remote village where people are very primitive and religious. When accidents start happening that involves her, people slowly start believing that she is possessed by the devil.

Algarve, late 90s. Following the death of her grandmother, Milene - a strong young woman full of life despite a slight mental handicap - divides her life between her family of notables and a Cape Verdean family that keeps her going, whom she met when her grandmother died. The wind that whistles in the cranes plunges us into the world of two families against the backdrop of Portugal's recent past.

Follows the Bourbon de Linhaça family and their precious Necklace of São Cajó, that's been in the family for over 3500 years and hides secrets, curses and a mythical cod recipe.

Mozambique, 1969. What was meant to be a peaceful Christmas Eve ends up badly as a group of soldiers brings home a prisoner that will be murdered. Simultaneously, the Capitan's wife arrives in surprise, bringing along a Priest, who is supposed to celebrate the mass.

A school inspector travels to the baron’s fiefdom to write a report on a heathen teacher. Having arrived, he is invited to stay with the baron, who makes predictions about women, horses and politics while the mysterious Idalina serves food and drink. The inspector becomes inextricably entangled in the baron’s world.

This short film is based upon a book of tales "Exemplary Crimes" by Max Aub who, in his turn, was inspired by real testimonies that describe crimes straightforwardly. The Testimonies are individual confessions by different persons that have nothing in common but the fact that all committed murder.

Pê, a man with terminal cancer, wanders through his city, Lisbon. Throughout the day, he is confronted with a reality unaware of his suffering while he prepares his imminent death by writing a farewell letter to his daughter. When emptying her father’s house, the daughter discovers the letter. It is the beginning of a new encounter.

In the 17th century a warrior woman fights for the independence of Angola. After witnessing the murder of her son and watching her people being humiliated by Portuguese colonizers, Njinga will become a Queen and struggle for their liberation embodying the motto: those who stay fight to win.

In a new land where everyone receives a new name and begins again without a past, Simón takes responsibility for David, a child he met on the crossing to a new life. Driven by an inexplicable conviction, he sets out to find the boy’s mother despite the fact David remembers nothing about her. When he recognizes Inés as the right woman, she accepts the role and an unlikely bond forms between them. While society imposes rules and treats difference as a threat, David resists being shaped and stands for imagination and freedom.

A small group of well-to-do vacationers go on a hiking trip into the woods just to find themselves mysteriously lost.

Twenty years ago, Henrique left Portugal for the peaceful Netherlands. A colonial war veteran, he desperately wanted to get away from his country which still defended a doomed African empire and from his traditional, landowning family. He’s back now. Everything is different. «Europe» knocked on the door and sprawled itself fast. Even the South had to face wrenching changes. And Henrique himself will have to face many events. Love affairs and dangerous threats. And the chalenge of his future.

Anastácio lives in Lisbon and is fanatic for Sporting CP, one of the city's football teams. When the team travels to face Porto, he follows it with the family, staying in house of his friend, Mr. Barata, pretending to be rich.

China walks towards the Lisbon district of Martim Moniz. In its wake, the children shout: China! China! China will leave at dawn, will fly away. Just wants to be happy. But drinking her own poison without leaving a drop. Sometimes the air is laden with iniquity and purgatory is a kindergarten...

Secret ladder. Borne from firmament. Stone, atonal waters. Chorus of silent hands. A vanishing act. Night is burning. Night is burning white. Flesh, a white fire. Avian. Given. Secret ladder. Mirror, become mirror.

In 2008, a corpse identified by the police with the birth certificate of the writer João Paulo Cuenca was found in an occupied building in Lapa. Inspired by this fact, the movie investigates the theft of the author´s identity in a ghostly Rio de Janeiro and in deep transformation. If in fiction and in crime sections of newspapers it’s common to read about people who steal the identity of someone dead to start a new life, what we have here is the opposite case: someone who steals the identity of a living man to die in his place.

Jorge, a successful engineer and employee of a ministry and Luísa, a romantic and dreamy girl, star as the typical bourgeois couple of the Lisbon society of the 19th century.

In 1496, King D. Manuel prohibited Judaism. 400 years later, Barros Basto, a Portuguese army captain converted to Judaism, and about twenty Jewish merchants founded the Jewish Community of Oporto, in the north of Portugal.

Nicholas celebrates his 40th birthday in his country house, with some friends. He has everything he ever wished for, but, on that night, he will end up dead, on his swimming pool. From that moment on, a dead Nicholas wonders how his life would be if he had made a different choice, ten years ago. We then follow two stories: on one hand the police, trying to solve the mystery of Nicholas' death and on the other, Nicholas himself, living a different life. A second life.

Mirages have been reported along the Spanish coast. A young French woman travels to San Sebastián to observe these visual aberrations. There, she meets a mysterious Portuguese woman who tells her a story from her youth: a story of gaze and obsession.

A 14-year-old kid, addicted to videogames, goes with his parents to a shopping mall and separates from them to go to a game store called UTOPYA. He doesn't come back. His parents get in despair, and his father tries everything he can to bring him back.

The Forest of the Lost Souls is a dense and remote forest, Portugal's most popular place for suicide. In a summer morning, two strangers meet within the woods.

The vacationers staying at the Barreiro Hotel in Araxá accompany the coffin of magnate Medeiros de Alcântara to the plane. Then they return to the hotel... At the beginning of the hydrotherapy season, Eduardo and Lúcia Feitosa, a wealthy couple from São Paulo, banker Belmiro and his wife, three spinster friends, Fátima, Teresa, and Belinha, Gen. Solon de Fuentes, the deposed former president of a South American country, writer Fernando Cavalcanti, banker Medeiros de Alcântara, and his wife arrive. In the hotel's halls and park, conventional life prevails, but it is in their rooms that the characters reveal their sexual and political dispositions.

An ex-guerrilla fighter wants to leave and forget the past, but is blackmailed by an old friend, who threatens to turn him in. Pursued by the police, he is eventually arrested.

Cristina disappears. Tiago, her boyfriend, says that she was kidnapped, two police officers (Marco and Madalena) investigate the case and try to find the truth.

In a rural setting, a sex worker struggling with a lack of clients encounters a fairy who offers magical assistance, drawing new customers to her. When a rival appears and begins to attract attention, the conflict gives way to an unexpected shift in relationships. The story concludes with a collective transformation among the characters, reframing the initial conflict.

A frontier sheriff and his young deputies search for a serial killer who is murdering prostitutes.

Elisa imitates her friend's feelings and moods. She is not aware of her behaviour but her aunt that knows Elisa too well, offers her a trip to Brazil to spend some time alone and work on her project about Brazilian popular myths. In Brazil and all alone, she experiences her first true feelings only to find out that everything she does, a mysterious Lebanese woman has done before.

Two schoolboys, Carlitos and Eduardo, fight for the affection of a girl, Teresinha.

Manuel Teixeira Gomes the Portuguese President who left everything behind with only one premise: become who he really wanted to be

Lina and Mariana run from an orphanage in Porto towards the south, in search of Lina's father. It is in a difficult and chauvinistic world that they end up finding Alberto who lives with Júlia on a hill somewhere in the Alentejo. Without informing that Maria is their daughter, they try little by little to know why she abandoned her. When they know the reasons, they both plan revenge ... and execute it.

Patrick, 20-years-old, lives in Paris with his older boyfriend. He runs a teenage pornography website, which results in a prison sentence following a raid at a party. Mário, 8-years-old, was kidnapped 12 years ago in Portugal. Patrick and Mário are the same person with two conflicting identities: a life in Paris filled with parties, drugs, and promiscuity and a new rural life in Portugal, where he feels obliged to reconnect with a broken family.

Elisha leads dual lives: daytime family duties and a nighttime project for his son and dying father. A crisis calls him back to Baltimore, dramatically transforming his world.

A baby is kidnapped in a Brazilian airport. Years later, the mother lives in Lisbon and works in a strip-tease bar so she can survive. When she is fired, she joins a gang of bank robbers...