Three unusual paintings played by the director that literally tests her limits in this encounters with the landscape of São Miguel, in Azores. The power that emanates from the filmed landscape is as seductive as the risky shape of the encounter between image and sound. A limit-film for an inventive Portuguese artist. (Miguel Valverde)
The family history of a Gipsy father and a non-Gipsy mother inspires the director to search for what her life would have been if her father, much like his own unconventional mother, wouldn’t have broken the tradition. In this journey of self-discovery she meets Joaquina, a young girl fully immersed in the Gypsy community and who is a counterpoint to the experience of the director. (M. Moz)
Dragonslayer portrays the life and journeys of Josh a professional skateboarder aka as Skreech or Dragonslayer according to a nickname of a friend. Josh in a self-destructive mode he travels from California to Copenhagen followed by wide angle lenses and grungy atmospeare of the non pretentious kind. A documentary divided into 11 chapters titled by two word sentences of bumpy strugling in between maturity and imaturity of Josh existance. Skating in empty swimming pools, crushing in abandoned houses Josh is searching for meaning. Punkrock poetry and crude impressionism, stunning cinematography using flamboyant colors this doc is especially addressed to the dreamers and non-compromised ones. A film about youth, music, travel, love, and skate that smells like a teen spirit. (Nina Veligradi)
While other teenagers go out on dates and get drunk for the first time, Sabine focuses single-mindedly on becoming a top athlete. Her single objective: to improve her physical prowess, no matter what the cost. Failure is not a word in her vocabulary. Even so, if she continues like this, she may be riding for a fall.
We are invited to the house of Ragnhild Borgomanero and her deceased husband, who own the biggest private collection of fossils in Latin America. Guided by the extragant housewife and with an purposive apparatus of fixed and staged shots, we discover a place where History and stories abound. (Miguel Cabral)
Dr. Johannes Hagel, a German psycho-physisist, prepares to enunciate the principle of contingency through an experiment with a model train connected to a computer. A mesmerizing film about science and a narrative that absorbs us from start to finish. (C. R.)
A scientist tells us that Pluto is no longer considered a planet. The feelings of disappointment and nostalgia, and the impossibility of being able to go back to certain moments of his life, make him want to find in the story of David an answer for whatever exists beyond science and reason. (Jorge Jácome)
Hybrid or fiction with a documentary basis, however we wish to name it, Pincus is an autobiographical vision of David Fenster, who used real images of interviews with his father over the years to build a narrative. In his thirties, Pincus Finster should know by now that the job is a serious thing, instead of letting his hippie friend sleep inside the houses he is responsible for remodeling, tying his own life along with the construction works. For anyone who refuses to grow up, he is quite mature when it comes to looking after his father, an Alzheimer’s patient who requires constant care. It is this paradox in limbo child-adult, and other antitheses ‚ not being able to decide between egoism and altruism, between a moving complacency and a moderate arrogance ‚ that he will fall in love with a yoga teacher (clearly using his father as bait for compassion) and seek solutions in alternative therapies for his father’s illness and his own existential crisis. The clear images of Fenster, in a documentary style, attenuate latent drama. (M. M.)
Mischa is the anti-hero in crisis and is on the vertex of an unusual triangle of disaffection. He is fired from the school where he teaches and throws himself into a spiral of bad decisions. The character, played by Nonny Geffen who also directs the film, doesn’t waste much time thinking about what he must do. The events escalate and Mischa acts as he thinks best: kidnaps an under age student, faces a group of angry feminists, kills his mother ‚ it’s alright, she asked him to, it was just a favor – goes after an old passion. The three of them, kidnapped, kidnapper and passionate, settle in his apartment in a somewhat possessive coexistence, waiting for the moment when everything ends. Salvation comes in the form of a star of Israeli cinema. (M. M.)
A long travelling opens the film and establishes the environment of this short, winner of the Golden Palm at Cannes 2011. The tensions provoked by the apparence of the end of adolescence give place to confrontation, but the tender and misterious ending takes us back to the lirism of the beginning. An eternal return shot with mastery and rigor. (Miguel Valverde)
The same situations repeat themselves and reality and fiction are confused inside the characters minds, to create a singular, circular film. Nature is there as a generous background, while literature’s importance obscures everything, especially the truth. Books and loud music serve as a distraction as everything is made up, except the fact with which the narrator opens the film: Júlio lives and Emília dies. They had Proust in common, but neither of them had read all of his books. The number of pages finished worked as an assurance, a way to keep the relationship alive, like a bonsai. Eight years later, Blanca is his new girlfriend, a believer in the small lies he tells her and himself. As windows, balconies, doors and bridges multiply in unconstrained shots, there is no way to cross over to see into who the characters really are. (Ágata Pinho)
Based upon photos of her family and boyfriend, Carina Freire directs the portrait of two opposite clans. Between the two of them: herself.
Three stories with no apparent connection between them, with only one thing in common: a deep dramatic observation of motherhood. Trying to fit The Moving Creatures in a cinematographic drawer is letting a film that is not afraid not to fit in formal territory slip away. Caetano Gotardo was fearless and jumped all boundaries to explore territories that interested him. In this almost Greek tragedy in III acts, the monstrosity of each action is totally overwhelmed by maternal love and shaped by romanticism. Cruelty is, indeed, in daily gestures, in the return to banality after an event that destroys all foundations. (M. M.)
A priest tries to fight the temptations of love, but ends up becoming a villain that terrorizes a city. An homage to silent film, this is also a new visit to a film that Conrad Wilhelm Meyersick, a German engineer and filmmaker, made while visiting Guimarães, in 1920. (A. P.)
Inspired by popular cult, O Coveiro is part light part darkness, a bedtime story and almost a nightmare. A child is born and his parents die of fright just to see him. André Gil Mata revisits the traditional Portuguese tale, in a fantastic movie where heads bounce, but you hear a song. (A. P.)
We enter the intimate world of Ely and Nina Bielutine, living in Moscow with a crow, a few cats and the major private-owned collection of Renaissance art (paintings and sculpture). This deeply human portrait marks constant parallels between real and dreamed life, and learns us how art may influence the way you see the world. (Karim Shimsal)
A smart cookie, a dreamer, a simple man and a lazy one live together during the pre-civilization period. With an accurate vision of cinema, the director uses pessimism and sense of humour to show us that man always stays like himself, no matter how many changes he makes in the world. And it ends in style. (Miguel Valverde)
A film belonging to the pagan and popular realm. A documentary with several layers of a praedial Portugal, about a man named Antero. Antero is wicked. Antero recites rhymes, verses and popular sayings. Antero laughs. Antero collects lost objects and fixes everything he finds. Like Joseph Beuys said, every man is an artist. (Carlos Ramos)