Roberto is one of those men to whom simulation has become the greatest art. He is an unmoved, inscrutable, mysterious man. But the truth is that Robert feels an intimate, deep tedium. The boredom of those who have already exhausted all the pleasures of life. The only thing still surprising him is...
The film was to be a documentary, but evolved during production to a fictional film. It nevertheless adheres strictly to the poems and letters exchanged by two of the most outstanding names of the Modernist Movement, Fernando Pessoa (in Lisbon) and Mário de Sá-Carneiro (in Paris). Their endless...
A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the convent. These rather ironic paradoxes turn this...
The story of Brazilian Antônio José da Silva, a jewish poet, playwright and lawyer living in the 18th Century Lisbon, who managed to avoid Inquisition by converting himself to Catholicism, after being tortured. But his fierce criticism of Portugal's élite led him to persecution and torture,...
A newspaper reporter comes across a man and woman arguing on the beach, and after obligingly driving the woman around when she seeks him out, he takes her back to discover that the man has been murdered. The woman takes off, but the reporter, after many twists and turns, runs into her on a train....
This is the story of a young Mozambican footballer called Eusébio, a gifted athlete destined to great achievements, coveted by rival clubs, Sporting and Benfica, which ends up hiring him. Blackmail, kidnapping attempts, ministers involved, press hysteria and huge money offers make the story of...
On the night of New Year's Eve, a small group penetrates into the room of an old hotel in ruins. Carmine, the oldest of the group, poses a challenge to one of the men, Furio: he has 4 months to restore the hotel and inaugurate it with great pomp. Aware of the difficulties but anxious to prove the...
Shortly after murdering his professor, a young man encounters a sailor who offers him a position on his ship in exchange for 3 Danish crowns and his attention as he recounts his life story.
The complex relationship between master and servant is explored in director João Botelho's adaptation of Denis Diderot's popular novel Jacques le Fataliste et Son Maître. As Tiago (Rogério Samora) drives his master (André Gomes) through the Portuguese countryside to an unspecified destination,...
Pierre, a middle-aged tourist guide, is the victim of a sudden failure : he does not recognize anything about him any longer. He goes back home and in his apartment he finds a mysterious young man who tells him he is here to avenge a young woman who has taken her own life. What share of...
Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest writers in Portuguese, created an immense parallel world and several heteronyms so as to endure the loneliness of genius. José Saramago, 1998 Nobel Laureate in Literature, has a heteronym, Ricardo Reis, return to Portugal after a 16-year exile in Brazil. 1936...
An aristocratic Sicilian family living in the 1950s. Count Villafratti has sex one night with his nymphomaniac daughter because he thinks she is his wife.
Vincent, a young Swiss, is upset by his meeting with the city of Lisbon. He will meet two persons: a prostitute of high flight and a great writer fallen and suicidal.
A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities.
On January 22, 1961, a group of Portuguese and Spanish opposition movement members seized control of the Santa Maria, a Portuguese luxury cruise liner, an operation devised by Henrique Galvão to expose the Government of Portugal as a dictatorship.
The French painter Edouard Manet painted four canvases depicting the execution in 1867 of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. This short dramatic film evokes the artist's studio and the events of Maximilian's death, using a single, uninterrupted shot to present the artistic thought process through the...
Mário and Cláudia are going through a divorce process. When Cláudia accepts job in another country, situation will lead parents to reassess many of their certainties and question the effects on the happiness of their children.