Five minutes before the big performance Maestro is getting ready behind the curtains. Time is slowly ticking away…
Secção: Observatório
Three characters linked by the mythical Maria Maddalena – Mary Magdalene… Tony Childress, an infamous, egotistical and obsessive actor/director is playing the lead role of Jesus in his controversial new film This is my blood. When the shoot wraps, Marie Palesi, his lead actress, is left alone in Jerusalem, drained, empty. ‘Selfless’. Into the void within her is poured the spirit of Mary Magdalene, and Marie embarks on a profound journey towards enlightenment. Meanwhile, in New York City, tv journalist Ted Younger begins his own quest for spiritual truth through his documentary about the life of Christ. When the premiere of Tony’s film becomes the target of bomb threats by the vengeful religious Right, the lives and paths of these three characters come dramatically together.And, in the end, a questions lies: does deeper faith lead to an ultimate form of love or to religious mania?
MirrorMask is the story of Helena, a fifteen-year-old girl working for her family circus, who wishes—quite ironically—that she could run away from the circus and join real life. But such is not to be the case, as she finds herself on a strange journey into the Dark Lands, a fantastic landscape filled with giants, Monkeybirds and dangerous sphinxes. Helena searches for the Mirrormask, an object of enormous power that is her only hope of escaping the Dark Lands, waking the Queen of Light and returning home.
A documentary in 17 movements, in which testimonies and the guitar define the genius, the bravery and the modesty of Carlos Paredes. In PERPETUAL MOVEMENTS ‚ A TRIBUTE TO CARLOS PAREDES a dialog is established between a guitar and a SP8 camera, in an aesthetic which evocates the memory of old family pictures, full of intimacy, revealed in the sharing of simple stories of life. The Carlos Paredes’s concert in Auditório Carlos Alberto, in Oporto, 1984, is the starting point for the unfolding of prison stories, resistance, success and amateurism, stories marked by simplicity and passion. Here we learn about how Paredes plays a song for the hotel’s receptionist, who mourns about not being able to attend to the concert that has just taken place. Or the way he uses a comb to exercise the guitar when he was in prison. The testimony of friends and colleagues lets us understand a bit more about who this man was, a man who, in spite of the privations, would never complaint, and who as left us a genius work of incontestable value, not only for the beauty of his compositions and his interpretation, but also for the dimension that it gave to the Portuguese Guitar – raising it to the class of an autonomous instrument in place of being a mere accompaniment for others – and transforming it into a symbol of Portuguese music beyond-frontiers. Remains the sensation of liberation that his art is capable to produce, and the mystics of the work he has left, full of deep enthusiasm and nostalgia for the future.
Featuring fierce rivalry, stopwatch suspense, and larger-than-life personalities, MURDERBALL is a film about tough, highly competitive rugby players. Quadriplegic rugby players. Whether by car wreck, fist fight, gun shot, or rogue bacteria, these men have been forced to live life sitting down. In their own version of the full-contact sport, they battle each other in custom-made gladiator-like wheelchairs, pursuing gold medals and proving to themselves and to anyone who sees them in action that there is life after disability. From the gyms of middle America to the Olympic arena in Athens, Greece, MURDERBALL tells the story of a group of indomitable, world-class athletes unlike any ever shown on screen. It will smash every stereotype you ever had about gimps and cripples. It is a film about family, revenge, honor, and the triumph of love over loss. But most of all, it is a film about standing up, even after your spirit, and your spine, have been crushed.
Sunny day in the outskirts of a small Portuguese city under a tree and facing a road this dysfunctional family have lunch. Domestic violence appears invisible to the group, and compassion non existent.
A man, a poem, and a family destroyed. History has never taught us so much! A hand warming tale of love, lust, incest, and death.
The horrifyingly hilarious story of a man who comes home and discovers his family has become the victims of a brutal attack.
Bipedalism, or ‘two-footed walking’, is the story of a painter who grew up in an orphanage and only years later learns the circumstances of his father’s disappearance and death. Childhood memories bring the main character back to the past: he buys a house in the suburbs that used to belong to his family. In the basement, he finds his father’s archives and scientific research documents on the hybridization of human race with related biological species. Studying the archive material, he unexpectedly finds evidence of efforts to renew the experiments on the remaining hybrid population. The painter then becomes a researcher, and consequently a victim. The basic idea of his father’s research was to change, control and influence the process of human evolution – initially connected with eugenics theories of the period before World War II, and now being placed in a context of modern ‘biotechnological’ expectations by his former colleagues. The main character tries to recreate and realize his father’s heritage, who was forced to cooperate with state terror organizations, using the results of his secret research. In a tragic manner, this information turns into the main character’s reality, at first forcing him to reappraise his father’s values and later driving him to madness.
A prize-winning writer, Reiko, moves to a quiet sub-urban house to finish up her new novel with a help from the editor. That night while sleeping, she sees a man in a storage room transporting an object wrapped in cloth. She soon finds out that he is a renowned archaeologist, Professor Yoshioka, researching ancient mummies, and that object was a recently discovered mummy. Working late on her book, Reiko witneses a ghost and finds out that her room once belonged to a woman who had been misssing for a while. This brings unexplainable fear to Reiko as she starts to uncover more stories from the past.
Young Jean Berlot’s mother has died in the lunatic asylum at Charenton. On his way home from the funeral he spends a night at a roadside inn. There he has a vivid dream ‚ the same dream he always has in times of stress, in which two hospital orderlies in white coats try to force him into a straitjacket. After a violent struggle, Berlot always wakes up to find that the room has been completely demolished. Another guest at the inn, the Marquis, witnesses the nightmare and its results. He pays for the damage and invites Berlot to his castle. On the way he hears Berlot’s story: when his father died his mother, who was much younger, went mad with grief. Since then Jean, who takes after her, has been haunted by the idea that he too will end up in an asylum ‚ hence the nightmares. But the staying at the Marquis’ castle will be therapeutic. After witnessing a blasphemous orgy and an unorthodox funeral, the Marquis helps him conquer his fears and takes his guest to an asylum where the patients have complete freedom and the staff are locked up behind bars.
Lisbon, 1972. Olga is a young woman with an easy life, being part of a bourgeois rich family. She attends university and society parties, plays tennis and spends afternoons in the swimming pool with her friends. She knows she’s different, her skin is not white, her body moves at a rhythm too intense. Olga faces the signs of that disquieting reality but prefers to ignore them. When her father returns from Angola after 20 years abroad, her fantastic world falls apart. Never having known her mother is like a wound that does not heal. Olga doesn’t know who she is or where she came from so she begins a search for her own identity and freedom. Olga gets involved with other people, other ways of living and with the theater. As an actress she realizes that the struggle of emotions and memories is made through the skin.
Ana is a child, an adult, tall, fat, thin… Ana is the part of us that sometimes wakes up without knowing who she is. These conscious amnesia that makes us travel, ask, look forward, even when it is not clear where we go and who we can find.
When a boy and a girl find an idol in the stomach of a rabbit, great riches follow, but for how long?
A pill-popping, over-caffeinated driver accidentally hits something. Panic-stricken, he seeks help in a strange and desolate town that offers very little in human kindness.
An inventive neon re-animation that tells of one guy’s search for happiness.
An ill fated and unconsummated romance between a fan and a flower magically created a fairy tale ending.
This is the story of a lonely man named John. He lives his life alone trying to connect with anything or anyone he can. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between hysterical laughter and hysterical crying.