Mauro is under house arrest. Tattooing helps him while away the time. Three local kids taunt him through his window. Outside, the midday sun beats down.
Secção: National Competition
“Arise (Zona)” comes from the feature film “A Zona”, by Sandro Aguilar and emerges up from all the cinematic dirtiness inherent to the filmic support. These images intended to emptiness and total forgetting, lead us to the ambiguity between life and death, in which narrative and temporal logic are suspended.
A cross between a road-trip in Portugal and a summer love story. It is the junction of a narrative line more philosophical and poetic with factual and personal elements. Julian is represented here as the “noble savage” of Rousseau: nature is his natural environment. Julian is like Adam, the embodiment of various myths created by mankind. (António da Silva)
Kali is the story of a boy who dreams of a place in the sun, but it is in the shadow that he finds the light he searches for. This is the last chapter of a trilogy and the result of a reflection on the themes and aesthetics that have inspired me: childhood and its fears, difference, loneliness, light and shadow. In the background is reconciliation with childhood, accepting adulthood, no longer escaping our fears and being able to see them from another angle. (Regina Pessoa)
In a Trás-os-Montes jail, preparation starts for the Way of the Cross staging and the prisioners, as if they were students again, gather in the classroom to receive instructions. The documentary watches them since their first rehearsals until the procession, with a detailed insight into the process: the dramaturgy taken very seriously, the image of Jesus’ wounds painted carefully, the making of the wooden crosses that close the film in a geometrical shot, the elderly witnessing the developments and singing about life and time never going back. The directors uses summary shots, filled with incisive, curious notes ‚ a poster of Jesus Christ on a door, as if he was a celebrity to be embodied. The quietness of the countryside and the peaceful life of the rural community form a contrast with the latent tension, the uncertainty of the future and ensure the nostalgia of tradition. (Ágata Pinho)
In Alasca landscape never changes, only grows old.
A skinny man, an ordinary man, wakes up and thinks: “It has to be today!”. It turns out that this skinny man has something very important to do, although a few tasks and a few domestic hazards on his way won’t let him to successfully accomplish his goal throughout a day that seems to last an entire life.
Wandering through moving images taken with a tourist camera juxtaposed with classic movies, From New York with Love is an essay on a foreigner’s evolving relation with his host country. (André Valentim Almeida)
While emptying the house where we lived all our life, we can find sleeping memories. Pedro finds a story from the past that connects him and his family to an armed revolutionary organization from the eighties, the period when his father disappeared. Pedro will have to revisit the past and in that journey he will awaken his survivors and bring to life his ghosts. Before, what mattered to his father and to his comrades were their politic ideals. Today, what matters to Pedro is to awake the Human story that everyone tried to hide and forget. One day, one has to do something, unexpectedly. As the “April Showers”.
Time rushes by us. It rushes like the clouds in the sky that are swept and left drifting by the wind. As it passes we live and feel its passage. A brief reflection about time and life seen through two moments of our mother’s lives.
Through the guitar and voice of António Zambujo, a consecrated fado singer, we hear the melody of a man who refuses to grow up, attached to his childhood memories. With meticulous lines and curious metamorphosis that conveys time, we feel like listening/watching until exhaustion to this emotional farewell to boyhood. (Miguel Valverde)
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)
A quiet house, an open door in the middle of the night. But peace is an illusion ‚ a son murders his father with his own hands and walks the next four hours barefoot to the police station. A crime in a village in a mountain of rural Portugal and a breach in the center of a family. (A. P.)
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)
Developing from an idea of diptych, the story of Anajara and Allison is told from two perspectives in continuity. If late night work complicates the life of one of them, the incarceration in jail of the other determines a cycle of separation. Salaviza’s skill to direct amateur actors is showed in this film, one of his more precise works. (Miguel Valverde)
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.)