The death of the queen left the court empty of feminine presences for several years. Between a cup of tea and a irony as sharp as a saber end, Corte is a chess game involving a murder and a birth, a fight for the succession to the throne.
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In “Corte”, the Rapazote twins send the traditional historic film to a place where the sun doesn’t shine. A royal palace intrigue, a “whodunnit”, a masterfully directed set of actors, a very well-written script and a hats-off to the dialogues. The duo does everything well, risking being a very serious case in Portuguese cinema. For more than 10 years, whoever paid attention to filmmakers from ESTC knows that the future of Portuguese cinema is theirs. And these reckless twins from Viseu turn the impossible into their normality. (Miguel Valverde)
“How much does a cloud weight?”, asks Lucretius. The roman philosopher has his desire affected by despair, inhabiting the abyss between science and magic. Based on a Marcel Schwob’s short story, Mouramateus crosses, with irony, the classic and the contemporary.
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French symbolist Marcel Schwob wrote, among a series of other semi-autobiographical short stories, about the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. In this anachronistic adaptation of this story, human nature is the obvious target of the philosophy on screen, but it’s the way in which the web of this cinematic narrative is created that surprises by the way it brings us closer to what it shows: not despite of, but due to its artifice. (Ana Cabral Martins)
The duo Francisco Queimadela e Mariana Caló (A Trama e o Círculo, 2015 and Sombra Luminosa, 2018) directs this sensory journey, between documentary and imagination. An encounter with nature, contact and affection, the movement of a familiar circle.
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Bodies, nature, flowers, animals, light and night, awaken a narrative of desire and dream. A film that hangs over things, approaches them, touches them … a film of gestures, hands, melancholic and agitated. Sleeping and awake characters move in a clean landscape of clear and dark desires; Valéry and Bataille, love and eroticism and the bravery of thought. And more ghosts and ancient mirrors of water that collect images. A film that shines, atmospheric, musical, enchanting. (Carlota Gonçalves)
Suddenly a mysterious woman appears in the West of Portugal. Everybody had seen her, but no one knew her. Mother, fairy, angel, owner of a wine business? Lúcia Pires’s (Fauna, 2018) documentary questions confabulation and existence without a proof.
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“It was night and the earth shook, a giant ball that spinned like a disk and inside it the shape of a woman”. One day, many years ago a woman appeared in a wine press of a local producer and blessed that same producer with it’s best harvest. Who is this nameless woman whose description got lost in time? “A Rainha” is a film about the veracity of the storytellers and a reflection on its form as a film. (Rui Mendes)
