This film is an attempt to disclose if Raul Brandão has left any trace, in Nespereira (Guimarães), the land he adopted as his own. Did Raul Brandão resist to the Portuguese non-inscription way? Has he left any trace in the general psychic and historic blank built by the Portuguese people, in which usually nothing leaves any trace?
Two boys, in a harbour, talk about leaving their home and city. Although they feel they can’t live outside, When one of them remembers a dream in which they were walking inside the sea, the other one reacts and takes the lead.
A boy drinks milk in the middle of the night.
A film essay exploring the way Los Angeles has been presented in movies, consisting entirely of clips from other films and divided in three parts: the city as background, as character and as subject. Then maybe I can find another way to animate this city symphony in reverse. Maybe this effort to see how movies depict Los Angeles may seem more than wrong-headed of mean-spirited. Los Angeles, it is said, is the most photographed city in the world. If you walk around enough, you’ll start to notice the mysterious temporary signs that direct crew members to a movie location. If you walk through the right neighborhoods, you’ll see the long rows of white trucks that mark and fence off a location shoot. Los Angeles is where the relation between reality and representation gets muddled.
Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos (1931-2008), engraver, painter, is one of the great artists of the 20th century. His world is the crepuscular world of the end of the Portuguese Empire, he who created the first metaphors against the Portuguese Colonialism. And who, with constant vitality, has opposed himself against the New World Order. Knowing, with Eliot, that “the past and the future time are both always present on the present time”.
Seven Days’ til Sunday follows a group of characters who commit the strangest follies in New York City, in a homage to silent film comedy.
Within a neighborhood association in Lisbon, a group of children participating in a creative dance class. They experience their body, feelings and develop their imagination. They take us gradually into a timeless world, a jungle inside which finds its reflection in the wild gardens and suspended from the Portuguese capital.
This milestone of the modern surrealist cinema follows the story of two girls, both named Marie, who try to understand the meaning of the world and of their life. The first scene shows them sitting in bathing suits and having a robotic conversation deciding to be bad. Throughout the film they engage in strange pranks as acts of rebellion. At the end they decide to go back and make everything right again, and that’s when a giant chandelier crushes them.
Lisboa is dying: bricks replaced doors and windows of old buildings in order not to have access to the forgiveness. It gives to the town an heterogene karma between what lives, what survives and what has been forgiven. Surrounding those broken walls, men and women, as forgiven as the landscape.
It’s a semi-autobiographical film. The whore is Hollywood and Fassbinder’s film is one the great movies about the making of a movie. Or not: on a film set both the director and the film material are missing. The cast and crew are gathered at a Spanish hotel waiting so they can begin work on a gangster film starring Eddie Constantine. We watch the bunch as they relate in this tense situation. The director’s arrival pushes them towards alienation.
…once upon a time factories worked night and day, no pauses, those were the assembly lines days… When they stoped, everything remained untouched… Assembly Line is an artistic installation on those spaces.
A film than curiously puts together imagens and sounds that echo in the near distance. We see a man walking through the countryside, a craftsman focused on his work, taming wood because of an idea, pure nature waiting for the dreams of man. Meanwhile, the craftsman tries to talk to frogs. There is an old man who speaks about God and women who chant wandering through the woods. Trains pass by every five minutes in front of the firm believer’s house. A calm interaction of the elements, in a place we feel like coming back to.
Everything created by nature tends to be unique. Everything created by Man tends to be the same and infinite in its reproducibility. In a steel foundry, from the incandescent molten metal to the cooling of produced parts, we witness the human capacity to transform matter for a mimetic structuring of the elements of the world.
Ruben, Marcos and Yohan, three friends of the same rap band, confide their expectation for life and their fears to the camera. Their portraits remind the difficult travel from childhood to the adult world, through a quotidian fight for life.
The film opens on a water-skiing accident – a girl (Délie) drives a speedboat and pulls a young man (Stan). They are both challenging their own limits when a crash occurs… Stan wakes up from a coma after this serious accident, to find out that genealogi
Between 1961 and 1974, thousands of men were mobilized and went to Angola, Mozambique and Guiné-Bissau to fight in a long and not really assumed colonial war. 50 years after its beginning, it still is a delicate and airtight matter, supported by an exclu
During the winter of 1995, Mimi, a young girl grieves her best friend, Julie, who died suddenly in a car accident. For the first time in 14 years, death is possible. It hits so close that it shook and amputates those who remain. It paralyzes, causes anxiety, anger and sadness. Where I am is rooted in the harsh winter of Quebec region, Abitibi. It’s a film about absence, about the importance of ritual farewell. A film about art as a way to express the grief.
With the city of Guimarães as a theme, Towers & Comets is the new film by Gonçalo Tocha, with sound by Didio Pestana. The city, the cradle of Portugal, was where Afonso Henriques declared independence and the birth of a new nation, in 1128. As part of its celebration as European Capital of Culture, this is one of several films that looked inside the city. Like a comet, Tocha hits the city and traces the origins: in holy figures, monuments, landmarks and music.