Discoveries from Portugal World Cinema

A country house. A weekend. A family. Time goes by. Silence prevails. "But listen to the breath of the unceasing message made of silence."

Polemical short documentary, produced by Cinequipe.

Traveling by the experience and by the roots of one of the strongest manifestations of Portuguese popular culture – singing polyphonic Alentejo. Evoking Michel Giacometti, the film questions the origins of the “sing” in the context of Mediterranean culture.

Ernania is hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in Mozambique. She dreams about her little son, Hanic, and her husband, Pak, who is a soldier of the war. In the meantime, a quirky musical instrument plays: her own bed. Ernania’s musical virtuosity, attracts the attention of the hospital nurses. One day, her song is played in a radio program and Rosa, an evangelical priest of “Rádio Moçambique”, goes to the hospital to listen to Ernania’s song. Ernania takes the priest’s visit as an opportunity to run away from the hospital.

Excess baggage, an old flame and new encounters.

Roberto, a retired and disappointed journalist, leaves his work in a farm and goes back to his hometown, Braga, which he thinks will be his last hiding place. However, in returning, he feels a strong energy in the city and between journeys to the past and an intense night life, a new chapter arises.

"Solo" tells the story of J, a saxophonist who finds a heart beating in his saxophone case, on the eve of his big concert at the International Jazz Show.

An arms smuggler organization uses a pirate television station to spread dissention among representatives in an international conference in Portugal. A French diplomat travels to Macao, hoping to locate a sexy spy who had stayed in Lisbon.

Father and daughter try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world of zombies.

Faced with the shock of an unexpected death, Sara finds herself trapped in a maze of pain, loneliness, and abandonment. As she travels through it, she seeks consolation in the justification of that fatality that shook her so much. But what he finds is not what he expected. With elements such as flowers, blackness or Entrudo monsters, it is a surrealist journey about death and the different rituals of mourning.

Documentary dedicated to the plastic artist Fernando Lanhas

One of the largest deer farms in Europe becomes a scene of conflict, in an atmosphere that transcends physical space. The pulse is a way to seize connections and disruptions within the Human-Animal interaction, pulling us away or drawing us closer to Nature.

An illiterate Cameroonian woman living in the Paris metropolitan area sees her daily life disrupted by her son's behavior. For some time now, Axel has stopped going out with his school friends and seems withdrawn.

"Na Trafaria" is an alternative mapping methodology that uses cinema as a cartographic tool. A heterogeneous and fragmented territory, Trafaria is made up of several organisms, here placed in relationship by the cinematic mechanism. This version, exclusively assembled for screening at Doclisboa 2024, traces just one possible route (among many others) through the place.

A young girl, traveling in the south of Angola, meets a retired doctor who deals with the memories of war and its perpetual waste. An adaptation of the short tale "The Dragonfly", by Ondjaki.

Samuel Muxingueno escapes from conflict areas in eastern Angola, and seeks shelter in Luanda. Here, his main enemy becomes his own shadow. Seeking to get rid of it, Samuel turns to life in the darkness of a deserted building. To be able to get back into the light, he makes a radical decision.

The transmission of knowledge between mothers and daughters

"The best and most complete documentary about Curitiba". When producer Rudinei Fanfa used this phrase to define this video he wanted to express how much his documentary is rich in content, and how he managed to show in only 47 minutes all aspects of this beautiful city.

Using texts and landscapes belonging to Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles and to a life of work dedicated to landscape architecture, João Mário Grilo composes this poetic documentary about the evocative power of nature and man.

Tia Creuza is a lady who works in a family home, and tells in a very funny way how is the day to day in the house of the bosses, personal life and everyday things. Mockumentary made by MTV, starring Marcelo Adnet.

The original family is expelled from Eden and forced to face the hardships of existence. However, each of its members sees the world differently. Tensions, jealousy, and feelings of guilt lead Adam, Eve, and Cain to gang up against Abel, forcing him to make the first sacrifice.

Set in Haiti, more precisely in the places affected by the 2010 tsunami, Ornithes shows us the attempt of theatre director Gabriel Abrantes to stage an as faithful as possible adaptation of The Birds by Aristophanes. However, his pedantic attitude dulls the locals, who start to rebel against his impositions. Spaced out by imaginative stories about wives transformed into goats and offered as gifts to Gods, Abrantes's revision is a game of mirrors, in which a fantastic tale alternates with another, representing a vibrant and colorful context where folklore, myth and modern myths such as Robert Patterson of Twilight overlap each other.

Timoteo (Jerome) has something in his body that he desperately wants to remove. He researches endless medical manuals on how to perform surgery on his own body, but for that, he also needs a guinea pig. There is no better subject for Timoteo than women who anonymously risk their lives at night for a little money and are physically weaker from the start, who will not put up a fight. Until the day Amanda (Correia) comes into his life and he finally gets what he is looking for.

Amanerado, fairy, zapatão, truck driver, affected, faggot, tomboy, campy. How can we define this "being like that"? The expression that sets us apart, that bothers others, that attracts their attention, that is known as "flamboyant," that makes that external gaze a reality.

Flatmates and old friends Sofia and João share a bleak fascination with decadent, ritualistic behavior, until they welcome Rayan, a stranded traveler couch-surfing for a night in Porto.

Fiction Based on Real Facts The film talks about the life of Jairo Santos, who dedicated his life to learning and producing professional audiovisual and who suddenly found himself without prospects for work, due to the pandemic of COVID 19. Driven by the force of need, he opted for disruption and started to fight against the adversities of modest life. And only with what he had in hand, he took the initiative to start an audiovisual channel on Youtube.

A look at various statues in the city of Lisbon. This film is incomplete and was distributed against the will of the director.

A journey across unique places that challenge the world of their time, landmarks of the future built by revolutionary minds that can be described, each in their own way, as architectural utopias. The film is divided in five chapters which represent five works.

A moment in the life of a grievieng mother with the identity crisis of her teenage daughter. The mother insists on wanting to understand what she only should accept, the daughter can not explain what should be accepted.

Fisheress, beware not to catch in your nets the sulfurous Seranha! The malefic Venenus, from her mouth injected, will inflame your sleeping ecstasy and transform you forever…

Silence is absolute and time dilates as we lose ourselves in an unpredictable space among non-existent places.

After fourteen years away from her homeland, Salomé is forced to return to Cape Verde to see her dying brother. During her stopover at Lisbon airport, Águeda, a cleaning lady, recognizes Salomé as "Mila", her childhood friend. Águeda invites Salomé to leave the airport and spend the stopover at her home, with the women of her family. The neighborhood transports her on a spiritual journey, whose destination reveals a painful bond with her homeland.

A man waits for his lover alone at home. When he finally arrives, the story of their relationship is told while the beautiful lover is indifferent to everything he's hearing.

Candide never loved her. Manipulation is his favourite game.

A film about a paradise through the eyes of those who live there. From the weight of Leve Leve to the sour of Doce Doce.

Diomar is the name and the central figure in the process of resistance of the old port of Calheta, a fishermen's neighborhood that no longer had access to the sea, losing its small fishing port in order to carry on the construction of a waterfront boulevard, which is today a "promenade" of hotels and casinos. Chosen to represent this subject, Diomar is a multifaceted character, who has always documented the island of São Miguel through his Youtube channel. The camera he wields is like a weapon against time to protect his memories, because after all "to remember is to live again".

Apes, humans, cyborgs. The physicality of the human has regressed, with the avatar now taking over his image. The machine is today the subject and the human its object. A Imagem por Vir (The Image to Come) takes pieces of Vinícius Lopes’ paintings by storm, continuing them, seeing what lies ahead of a world painted by an author who didn’t even exist yet. Perhaps the authors no longer exist.

‘Mulher a Mulher’ is a Portuguese TV show dedicated to the condition of women that aims to demystify gender prejudice. Its last programme looks at the literary and cinematographic work of Marguerite Duras (writer, playwright and film director) with an interview conducted by writer Yann Lemée and provided by the Centro Nacional de Cultura, in Lisbon.