Discoveries from Portugal World Cinema

Nowadays the art of baking bread has become so common that it lost the charm of its confection. This documentary presents a bakery that has never lost the essence or taste of producing this essential good. From distribution to production, gestures can be observed that, in the mere details, allow us to appreciate this ancient art in a way that is not common these days.

Shot with an iPhone, Layla meets Lancelot is a record of the director’s daily journey to and from work. Does happiness lie in accepting repetition or in interrupting it? Everything long awaited always takes place unexpectedly.

"I write to have a mountain of books when I die." Psychiatrist António Lobo Antunes is one of the most internationally recognized Portuguese writers. His novels, usually settled in Lisbon, are published in prestigious publishers in several countries (Christian Bourgois, Random House, Luchterhand). In Nordlund's film, the characters and scenes from his books constantly interrupt the writer's speech. Lisbon invades his home. The voices of the characters impose themselves to the writer's house. António Lobo Antunes compares his writing to a watercourse that leaves to freely find its way.

As if she wasn’t there, indifferent to the boredom of the children around her, the teacher continues to write a poem by Camões on the blackboard. Valéria, Simão, Tomás and André exchange a glance and leave without anyone noticing it. They start running. Nobody runs like children. Run, run tiressly. Unknown landscapes, adventurous places, and… Nature: a new and intense place. Too fresh, too intense. Does Valeria and her companions have left the classroom or woke up inside a dream?

José-Manuel Barata Xavier reflects on his old childhood bathtub.

Images from my family archive remind me of a text by Borges. Little by little, I transform Averroes into my grandfather, my grandfather into Borges and Borges into me. In this movement, it becomes increasingly difficult to look at any of them without, too, glimpsing all the others.

On his second comedy special, Patrick opens his apartment doors and presents himself to his fans, friends, family members and even his dog. Problems with bricklayers, adaptation to his new neighborhood, married life and his childhood on an evangelical church are the themes of the jokes recorded at Patrick Maia's own apartment.

Aurora is a modest young girl, working as dressmaker for the women her popular district, near the OPorto cathedral. One day, through a hintz-dress design competition, she gets involved with a haut couture atelier.

Capitalocene. From above, the abstract monumentality of the Niger Delta (Nigeria), redefined by human ambition into environmental catastrophe. Existential fable. Another no-man’s-land, where the blackness or the psychopathology of (Frantz) Fanon’s colonization (and other African philosophers) seems now like an empty sound, and scholar debates, that understand neocolonialism, echo distant and misfit. In the war for oil, we find the resentment of a region forgotten and cursed by its resources.

A compilation of missed footage from Cherry's interview, which was recently found

Guatemala - which means country of many trees. In the so-called "everlasting spring," the adventure boasts an extraordinary climb and view of the Fuego volcano, a visit to the Mayan city Tikal, a tarantula encounter ... among many, many other amazing stories and experiences that this country - and people - they provided us. "Paraíso Xibalba" is the second Maduco Beleza travel documentary in partnership with Landescape, directed and produced by Marco Almeida, voiceover and presentation by Rui Unas and as travel leader João Amorim.

Quitterie, a 40 year-old woman, relives the great love for her deceased 18 year-old Japanese partner, by successively meeting up with young strangers.

In early 2020, this would have been a documentary about freshman initiation rituals, but a pandemic and three months confined at home end up changing the author and the direction of this project.

Frei Gualter is sent by S. Francisco de Assis to Guimarães around 1213. The devotion to this franciscan friar started to rise and in 1577 the brotherhood of S. Gualter is created. The Gualterianas are celebrated since 1906, the new way of celebration in honor of their patron.

At the counter of the Bar of Soap everything looks the same at first sight. Strangers start deep and sincere conversations about the similarities and differences that might bring them together. Fed up with the social conventions imposed on them, Sonia and Filipe reflect on coincidences, relationships, and happiness. At the end of their conversations, will they still be strangers?

In the Douro, five winemakers get together with the aim of exporting Portuguese wine to the world.

The vertigos in the urban landscape take the Bird-Man back to his origins, in a metaphor about life cycles. "Bird-Man" is a film from the poetic nature of Brazilian singer, Ney Matogrosso. During the 1970s dictatorship, he broke sexual taboos with a "strange" behavior on stage and became one of the most famous brazilian singers. Inspired in Cassiano Ricardo's concrete poems and the experimental music of Ney's repertoire, "Bird-Man" explores a sound and visual lyrical aesthetic of high contrasts that approximates man to nature's feelings.

Connected tells the story of a devoted couple who can communicate telepathically with each other. After an uncharacteristic row one morning, Jack leaves for work. Minutes later, Louise tries to send him a message to apologize. Distracted, he drives into an oncoming vehicle. Louise feels the impact. His death rips her apart.

Momento marks a second encounter between Manoel de Oliveira and the singer-songwriter Pedro Abrunhosa, whose song of the same name inspired Oliveira’s short film/music video.

Amid the aftermath of Mozambique’s civil war, I visit my grandmother, confronting fading memories and blurred lines between truth and fiction. A former rebel’s presence in the village echoes the relentless ghosts of war, mirroring the tensions of my generation.

A man walks out of a restaurant and comes across a news reporter.

This last testimony of Robert Kramer (1939-1999) is a moving documentary with the independent American film director, in which he speaks of his political activism, his way of filmmaking, his relationship with Portugal and the revolutionary movements.

A film about a show and the issues the players face during their collective artistic work. Will we ever be able to leave our cocoons towards a collective movement? How strongly do we believe in those who should lead us? How strongly do they believe in us? We try… We fall… We rise… We try once again… Will we ever make it?

A man is haunted by the ghost of a spider crab.

João, a boy of only 7 years old, is curiously trapped inside a mansion on a dark night. From then on, he encounters unexpected events with strong connections to his past and future.

A relentless search for a best friend.

The film documents the start, and difficult progress of a house cooperative in the fishermen's village of Meia Praia, during the revolutionary process in Portugal, from April 25, 1974 until mid-1976.

Maria starts to show signs of wanting to belong somewhere else: scales appear on her skin, roots appear on her legs, and she hears the sound of water - she dreams of being a fish. One day her daughter comes across her disappearance and reconstructs, through the memory of her gestures and meetings with her mother, a possible explanation for her escape.

Girl meets girl ... through a security camera. Can Miriam leave the totem and realize her fantasy? Or will she let the unscrupulous Karen stay with Brenda's love?

The world seen through Ana Lara's eyes. Between illness, manipulation and love, Ana Lara lives in constant confrontation with her own escape.

K just crashed his Mercedes-Benz into a tree, moments after trying to avoid running down a small wild animal that ran across his path. He is on a backwater road in the countryside and it’s a very dark night. His evening has only just begun...

Short film by António Palolo.

Two women in a room. A rainy afternoon. They talk about their desires. Perhaps their wounds. Forms from the past seem to unite and separate them.