Discoveries from Portugal World Cinema

A documentary about nightwatchers in Recife middle-class buildings.

In this love story, a young couple faces an uncertain future between Africa and Europe. When they reunite in Lisbon, sharing a house with other immigrants, farness and closeness will test their relationship.

Ricardo is a teenager searching for a way out of a ruthless reality that traps him and everyone around him, preventing them from reaching for the stars.

When his wife dies during child-birth, Arsénio turns to a foul ritual with hopes of having the daughter he never got to know.

“Prune me in January Tie me up in February Dig me up in March And you’ll see what I’ll do to you.”

The pieces silently start gathering into the room, while the giants, unaware, keep living their macabre routines.

In the "hostelised" Lisbon by the new tourism and hillbilly cosmopolitanism, society is called to the reception.

A compilation of films project multiple versions of people won by vida.

Description: Very rare images of a bullring. Children playing at home. The docks. Family in front of the moored ships. Child in front of a race announcement at the Jockey Club. Travel by train in the direction of the suburb of Rio de Janeiro. Cine Oriente, in Olaria. Party at Penha Church. Picnic. Rare images of street carnival with black musicians and revelers, possibly in Estácio de Sá. Costumed family. Carnival blocks. Carnival corso on Avenida Rio Branco. Woman killing chicken. Men dressed as women at the carnival. Battle of confetti and rice powder.

A jester must entertain. But he doesn't always want to.

A woman is alone and depressed.

Nine people are suddenly asked about the purpose of their lives. Getting to know several unique minds, "Razão de Viver" is a documentary that explores many topics such as Mankind, the pursuit of hapiness, art, money, education and God.

In his childhood haunts, in the village of Várzea dos Amarelos, the filmmaker films peasant life with its seasonal and daily rituals: a festive meal, the slaughter of a pig, bread-making. The film slides into imagination and blends with fiction: memories and dreams, imagination and reality intermingle in this work full of enthusiasm that has an enormous freedom of form and a zest for life and discovery of the world. With a strong documentary element, it mixes professional actors with the inhabitants of a small village, telling the story of a small film crew in a village living day to day.

The film “História de um Caramelo” is an adaptation of an original short story by Rita Serra, entitled “O Caramelo”. It is an imaginative story about the life of a particular caramel, who suffers the bitterness of life, as he spends his days in an abandoned gas station in the middle of the Alentejo in the 60s, until the day his use-by date expires...

Taking its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens, the film is composed of a series of attempts at looking and being looked at. Beginning as a city state commission under the name and attitude of “Unschool”, the film became a kaleidoscope of the experiences, questions and wonders of a couple of high school students after a year of experiences with filmmaker Ana Vaz questioning what cinema can be. Here, the camera becomes an instrument of inquiry, a pencil, a song.

What would we be able to do for love? How far could we go in an extreme situation? Is there a monster inside each one of us waiting to reveal itself? Guilherme is a young man like many others, with dreams and aspirations, until one day his grandfather’s health puts him to test.

At his girlfriend's family's formal dinner, Mateus, an anxious young man, attempts to conceal his secret from the bizarre family members who suspect him.

1979. Flicking through pictures from a Soviet magazine, 15-year-old Martim dreams of building a new society. His radical communist parents send him to study at Astrakan for one year. In her new film, Catarina Mourão captures with tremendous precision the moment a middle-aged man passes his story on to his son, thus shedding the taboo of his ineffable experience.

The famous short-story by worldwide known writer Edgar Allan Poe takes a twisted and never seen turn when adapted to the the controversial and harsh world of the Portuguese dictatorship times of the "New State" in the 20th century.

Evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks. A humid take on minerals, where sci-fi meets sci-fact. The geo-biosphere is a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.

Discussing cinema during a pandemic – a revisit to an online film club, after thirty post-viewing discussion sessions that took place during the first lockdown.

On November 11, 2020, the day on which Angola celebrates the 45th anniversary of its independence, Cine Africa joins the Angolan audiovisual production company Geração 80 to show documentaries of the project “This is our Memory”, stimulating the production of memory about this historic landmark in the country. All were acquired under the initiative of the Tchiweka Documentation Association called “Angola - On the Rails of Independence”.

Edmund Husserl observed: "All perception is a gamble", which Robert Anton Wilson expands upon when he suggests that "[others] just have a different reality tunnel, and every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world, if we are willing to listen." All seen through the mirror of João Queiroz’s art.

Manuel João Vieira shows us his home - or homes - and the characters who live there. The starting point is the characters' definition and the Casa Manuel Vieira exhibition. The Italian neighbour and the accidental tourist help us create scenarios on the man and the artist. In short, it is Manuel João Vieira and his rather particular working universe.

In a small coastal African village, Jaki lives, in a house full of cousins ruled with an iron fist by grandmother Agnette and haunted by the mysterious figure of Grandmother Catarina. The life of the neighbourhood revolves around the construction of a Mausoleum for a deceased President that threatens to demolish the local residents’ houses. “Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret” is an adaptation of Ondjaki's novel.

The journey of an intellectual Creole. Before returning from Lisbon to Luanda, he stops in the Cape Verde islands in search of his ethnic and cultural roots.

Ti Miséria has a supernatural power. When Death comes to take her, she traps her in a pear tree. But without death the world doesn't work. Those whose work depend on Death, want it to be freed from the tree. It is then that Death makes a deal with Ti Miséria.

An urge to change, a yearning to traverse the subconscious. As we drift, rootless and restless, into the interior of guitars and other gateways, so does reality shift (from real-world to fabricated, from an industrial, lifeless landscape to a natural one, from underwater to the martian desert) in this lyric video with surreal and fantastical elements. Wandering through different dream realms, impatiently navigating towards chimerical thresholds, are these the little worlds we devise when connecting with our art? What exactly are we searching for? And did we find it? Explore strange new worlds (and discover that maybe they are also ours?) as Albert Hammond completes his vision of his bold new single 'Don't Bother Me Babe' with a multi-dimensional graphic video.

Manuel and Pedro have different approaches to love. Manuel suffers a disgust that makes him sullen, and enters the priesthood. Pedro keeps on in his carefree ways, and commits a robbery. Manuel knows the robber is Pedro, but he learned it in Catholic confession. To keep his vows as a priest, he is prepared to be arrested.

A TV set awakens and tries to tune himself in, but with no success. When he accidentally comes across the weather channel, it’s the weather girl, rather than the weather, which catches his attention...

Fertile Species

A series of three short films about the mining village of São Pedro da Cova.

A short movie written and directed by André Marques.

Luís Mário Lopes wrote the solo A Boa Alma for Mónica Calle in 2015, based on the works of Bertolt Brecht marking the departure of Casa Conveniente from Cais do Sodré and their arrival in the new venue in zona J, Chelas. The original score is by JP Simões.

Vanessa is a teenager like many others, who lives with her mother in the periphery of a big city and misses school to player with her friends. Things change when she gets pregnant.

Aldo, a former photographer, is fired from his college professor job a little before his retirement. With no job perspective, he decide to sell his old work tools,and burn some of his pictures.

What makes a free woman choose a prisoner to develop a loving relationship? “The Visit” is a film about love in this special condition. Among the characters, some met their partners in the penitentiary; others had been visiting their husbands for decades. They feel valued by them and say they are well loved. They are women who insist on a relationship full of constraints and privations, even suffering various consequences of this option on a daily basis. In this film the prison universe is almost exclusively present in the report of the women, and never from the point of view of the husbands.

View of Colares and its region. The manufacture of Colares’ wine. Adraga beach. Maçãs beach. The Maçãs beach tram. Azenhas do Mar.

In an apocalyptic world the routine of the days and hours are the only company of a survivor. He deals with the difficulties of solitude, hunger and fear which rule his life and faces the threats around him. What are those noises that disturb his peace? Who haunts him? Who is he chasing?

A first-person account on what it is like to be a part of the indigenous group Guardians of the Forest, in the indigenous territory Caru (Maranhão, Brazil).