No matter how calm the surface of the ocean appears to be, each time we cross the line that divides land and water we enter an unknown and unexpected world. Did our world remain the same by the time we come back ashore?
Secção: National Competition
In early 1990s Mozambique, following the dissipation of the Civil War, a sensitive boy named Muidinga struggles to survive without the presence of his parents – who have long since disappeared, whereabouts unknown. As the story commences, Muidinga happens upon a diary found near a lifeless corpse that speaks of a woman on a ship seeking her estranged son. Certain that the woman in question is his mother, he embarks on a long journey in search of her, and soon gains the support and assistance of a traveling companion, the elderly Tahir. The two set out on a long trek from one refugee camp to another hoping to find at least some trace of the woman who brought Muidinga into the world.
A man and a woman, strangers to each other, are stuck in a elevator for six hours. Miguel has in his hands an envelope with the results of his cancer exam and doesn’t have the courage to open it. Ana is terrified with a mouse that has invaded her home, so a part of her is relieved she’s being kept away from the apartment. These two strangers become more and more close, and even turn out to be the answers to one another problems.
The last inhabitants of Azinhaga dos Besouros, in the outskirts of Lisbon, don’t have any legal right to rehousing. They live their district’s demolition, where it will be built a rapid access road in the future.
I placed the pick axe in one of the marble joints and pressed hard. And I pressed, and I pressed. There was James Joyce. I looked to the sky and couldn’t find the moon. Based on the short story The Corpse of James Joyce, by José Luis Peixoto.
A documentary about Ufology in Portugal. Everything started at Fátima or maybe before. Many are those who dedicate themselves to the cause. The UFO’s are not only manifestations of literature and Hollywood cinema. In Portugal many persons search for evidences and ways to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligent life.
It’s now seven months over my mother’s death. I am facing the S. Miguel island sea, the family land in the Azores. Between the newborn babies, I found my Grandaunt, 91 years old, waiting for her moment to part. At night my family speaks to me of God and death. During the day we swim in the island’s volcanic sea, where I find Florence and Beru, a French couple that is crossing the Atlantic in the Balaou, a sailing boat. They invite me to come with them. Divided in three moments and eight lessons, Balaou” is a voyage to accept the oblivion of things. “
China go downstairs in direction of Martin Moniz district, in Lisbon. When she passes the childreen scream: China, China!. China is flying. To escape far away at down. She just wants to be happy. But China drunks her own poison. She drunks it all. Sometimes air seems loaded with evil, purgatory seems an infant school.
It is said that Floripes, an enchanted mourish girl, wanders about the village of Olhão, every night, sad and doomed. Hostage of her enchantment, she represents the fear and suffering of this fishermen’s community, whom, dazzled by the spell of the fair and mysterious woman, would die when attempting to cross the seas. This myth is the excuse to evoke their dreads and our greatest fear – death.
Attitude is a small detail that makes a big difference. Here’s the time to talk about another side of Coimbra, an Portuguese university city. This is the story of one of the city’s most famous exports ‚ the Tedio Boys. The first of its kind with visibility and, more than any other label, a certain attitude. As a result, the city’s visual landscape changed ever since.
The leaflet promised a fantastic day of fun in a bus tour that would take us sightseeing around the country. The trip, only for people over twenty-five, would also include a delicius lunch, presents and a demonstration of items for your home and health. An outing not to be missed, said the the pamphlet.
Jaime Ícaro works on a weekly tv magazine. At the end of another dull working day he recieves a fax from Teresa, his girlfriend, breaking up from their one year relation. Jaime leaves the office reading the fax, and only a few minutes latter realises that Lisbon is not having a normal rush hour‚Ķ
In an inverted world, where art oscillates between a political decoration and a conversation between illuminated people, someone in the antipodes of art attempts to undo the mirage and, before ghosts, in the centre of the world, thinks of the noise that could save him.
Cova da Moura, Arrentela and Porto Salvo. The black rap from the surrounding area of Lisbon creates a circle around the city itself. It points a finger at racism, police violence and poverty. The life of black people. Hip Hop is intervention. I don’t want anyone dancing, I want them thinking, says Jorginho, one of the eight interviewed rappers.This documentary listens to the words, frees the voice.
The first 110 years of the Portuguese cinema history in short and made almost exclusively with archive footage from the series History of the Portuguese Cinema produced in 1998 by Pedro Efe. It conjugates film clips and testimonies of some of its most relevant contributors. The film tries to report this history chronologically, in an accessible, concise and didactic way, in spite of some gaps.
– What if I was a teacher? One who teaches numbers… My students would learn how to count to infinity in an hour… Those who couldn’t would get punished! – That’s it, Maria! My dream is to fly…
A bizarre and tragic ballad of an impossible love between a nameless topographer and Leonor in a swamp soon to be destroyed by the forces of Man. She (Teresa Salgueiro, ethereal voice of Madredeus) is the swamp-flower, protégée of a Socratic Director (and his goat Plato). In a world without women, she is kept safe from the temptations of the flesh by her strict and grotesque Aunt. The sound-track entirely played by the workers (fado and bossa nova singers) reveals parallel narratives of suspicion and conspiracy that unfold to the pace of the unconscious leading to a confrontation between Man and River. Inspired by a hypnotic story by Branquinho da Fonseca (1905-1974).
A man, a woman and a house: one space in two tempos breaking up in the same movement. João is a meteorological observer. Marta folds leaflets and puts them in envelopes. João measures time, Marta spreads it out. A love story like a cloud, that rises, thickens, shreds and falls, in a continuous way that is never the same.