Discoveries from Portugal World Cinema

It is not the landscape that changes. Every service station is a service station. What changes is being in movement.

An AI character comments and questions conventions regarding sexuality, gender and communication patterns.

A political musical film about a Pink Jacket that always has something up its sleeve. In the comfort of its home, Pink Jacket uses couture and torture to stitch up the opponents of the system. Mónica Santos has already won twice the Audience Award at Curtas with “Between the Shadows” (2018) and “Amélia & Duarte” (2015).

Photographer-turned-radiologist José Fontes revisits the now-inactive psychiatric hospital where, for two weeks in 1968, he captured the complexities of everyday life in a series of harrowing photographs.

Isolatta show four isolated artists, each one in their apartment, in the same building, contrasting the hiper-reality of quaarantine's everyday experience with poetization of same desires, anguishs and hopes though the dance.

A filmmaker on his way of making a film about lunacy. Making researches, going to a sanatorium, with documental parts, interviewing mentally ill people.

At 23 years old, Telmo never had a romantic relationship. Without hope, he's ready to give up on life, until his act is interrupted by Clara, an enraged girl that was left behind by her boyfriend in the middle of nowhere. Together, they decide to go after him.

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.

It's Sunday, day of rest. At the river, the father fishes and drinks, the mother sleeps, the daughter plays...

In Porto, 1975 the subjective viewpoint of the camera takes us through another emblematic example of Portuguese history from the 1970s, thanks to a single long take lasting the whole duration of a 16 mm reel. Bouça was a social housing project initiated in 1973, just before the end of Salazar’s Estado Novo, and conceived by an architect whose renown would subsequently become international: Álvaro Siza. César’s camera wanders lightly around the housing development, crosses through an apartment and stops in an architecture agency installed in what should have been the nursery school.

The leader of the opposition to the government is murdered. Behind the headlines: a complex conspiracy, a corrupt power and three female assassins.

An observation of post-colonial economic relations through the intersecting trajectories of two Filipino women: one preparing to leave her native island to work as a domestic in Europe, the other to return for good.

Orphan of the country where he was born, orphan of the Portuguese state. Imprisoned for half his life, never free. Bruno is ‘Ghoya’, a Cape Verdean Creole rapper and political activist. This film is a crossroads in a moment of struggle and life.

After having walked the streets of Mellila, Malik, Mehdi, and Hassan now beat the cobblestones of Paris, discovering its lights and its chimeras, its joys and its violence...

Journey into Ricardo Martins' creative continuum. The conception of the album 'Distraimento' as a visual moment of a perpetual cycle of transformation, where music evolves as a living organism.

Some time passed and Felícia narrates important moments in her life that took place during this period. She and still has a feeling of incompleteness. Upon meeting Sandra, she will begin to question her dreams and goals in life.

Mixing fiction and documentary, DAMAS DA NOITE tells the story of Júlia, a street girl who wanders around the city fighting for survival. She sells chewing gum, commits small thefts, until, due to lack of option, she begins to prostitute herself.

Portuguese documentary regarding the early punk scene in Portugal.

In Sarajevo, in a cinema’s projection booth, lives Sena; a woman who in daily solitude repeats the projection of the few Yugoslavian films of which there are copies. Through a combination of silence, the everyday gestures of this woman and the films that are projected from her living room, comes a film built like a day in Sena’s life. Through the films that Sena projects, we are taken on a journey in both collective and personal memory. The film offers a portrait of intimacy crossed with a history witnessed by cinema; a history which Sena has conserved.

PP decides to invest all his family fortune in a new line of production of his new project for a new FAMEL motorcycle, but he doesn’t expect that someone has other plans for his project.

There is a complex geo-human situation of isolation in Trás-os-Montes, a region in northeastern of Portugal. A used railroad bridge bought for only 22 villagers.

The simplicity of her interrogative method and the way in which her protagonists are questioned stand out in this documentary, which the director also called "Workers".

A man from the countryside watches his life pass through a frightening transformation after witness a star falling from the sky. Completely lost, he has only one friend to help him find a way out of his terrible condition.

A fictional documentary about the acceptance and understanding of the artistic deconstruction of ideas and themes that are rooted in a certain collective imagination of our society.

A poetic essay about the undesirable, the lack of control and duality. "How to deal with the unexpected lives that appear on the ground?" is the starting point to this question-mark-shaped short film, that seeks to explore the different possibilities of interaction between human beings and the uncontrollable side of nature.

The most well-known fascist propaganda film in Portugal. A communist man falls in love with a woman of Salazarian beliefs and changes his way of looking at things.

A synthesis of the life and soul of Portugal, with the sea, the river, the mountains, the plains, and the people who dance and work, cry and laugh, are born and die. From the Minho to the Algarve, distant places, sometimes difficult to access, were chosen for their beauty and picturesque, to figure in a register that allies realism to poetry?

A short film that captures the loneliness of old age in a consistent, close and courageous manner. It shows us the daily life of a woman lost in time and abandoned in her fajã.

Ara has always believed she will vanish when she turns 28 years old. As her birthday approaches, she submerges in the most fundamental sensations of existence. A masterful debut film from director-writer Ágata de Pinho, whose performance leads her character from trauma to catharsis in the most beautiful way.

On a secluded island lives an autonomous community of children who don’t speak, communicating only in gestures. Guided by the eldest among them, they operate like an agrarian commune with strict rules and beliefs. Adults are banished into the surrounding woods, and every year, the oldest member of the village is sent to jump off a cliff – a ceremony that is believed to bestow eternal youth on the chosen one. This way of life is threatened when one adventurous child heeds the call of the forbidden forest.

A spectacular view of the world as seen from Armando and Maria's control tower, eight floors up from the river Douro. A comic and probing portrait of an old Portuguese couple whose private life has remained permeable to the modern world.

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 theatre having national as part of its name, at the top of a square, reflecting a country’s history. But which one? This is a voyage through the various narratives about D. Maria II National Theatre, forged through the intentions of the several regimes that intended to convey their own ideologies within the theatre’s mission. This is also the story of those who fought against it, opposed the institution and became part of it. How can one become heir of these stories, even if never having set foot inside.

Short film by Piquenique na Lua.

A war with two barricades, a place where the macrocosm and the microcosm intersect, and the thin line between desire and rejection eventually fades.

An entomophobic filmmaker faces her fears through a series of expeditions and encounters with a Hungarian neurologist obsessed with beetles. Curious about what his passion for insects can teach her, director Mariana Castiñeiras perfectly pins the thrill of discovery. Why do desire and fear fade once conquered? How do collecting and psychology drive the relationship between documentarian and subject?

This documentary follows a 70 years old, Angolan nurse on a nearly impossible humanitarian mission into her home country. In a southern region that was specially affected by the long lasting, recent civil war, the local hospital has to be restructured. At this place where accidental death, poverty and lack of hygiene continue to be a part of people's daily life, the subversive presence of mystical forces seem to reinvent the meaning of life.

Lost late night in Curitiba, an incident at an extremely amateur and clandestine boxing match echoes through the dark. Eva is forced to once again save her species to stay in the city.

Short film by Fernando Lopes, decisive figure of the Portuguese New Wave.

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