Lisbon, Portugal, 2010. Pilar, a pious woman devoted to social causes, maintains a peculiar relationship with her neighbor Aurora, a temperamental old woman obsessed with gambling who lives tormented by a mysterious past.
The gritty lives of Portuguese villagers are shown in this action drama which shows the interaction between a married couple who have taken an unusual vow of celibacy and a gang of gypsies who are terrorizing their village. The film highlights many ancient religious traditions still current in...
A portrait of the everyday life of a typical middle-class family in parallel with the fall of the "Estado Novo", the 48-year dictatorship led by Salazar. The daughters' conflicts and frustrations with their parents, their grandmother and their maid find an obvious echo in the country's collective...
In a unique approach to what amounts to four pseudo-morality plays, director Monique Rutler has a street entertainer with hand puppets summarize the characters and idea of each story. The first sketch is about a young man who shines shoes for a living, and tries to keep up a relationship with two...
Ambulatory history, freely inspired by Georg Büchner's biography (1813-37) and the reasons that led him first to political intervention and then to strict isolation. With students of unidentified present time (1968? 1970?), the themes developed, in Büchner, are triggered by the publication of...
The young girl, Antónia Margarida Castelo Branco, is handed over by her mother to Brás Telles de Meneses because of the obscure interests between rural aristocratic families in the North. Brás is a ruined man, a bohemian with a reputation for violence and erratic behaviour. Antonia’s fortune...
Luciano, fresh out of jail, was taken by his brother, Flórido, to serve in the home of wealthy Alfreda. He was surprised when she told him that her greatest desire was to see the Virgin Mary. Now comes this rich land owner with her sublime pretensions. Isn't it enough for her to have an Aston...
Parallel tales of young couples desperately escaping cruel false fathers, each couple on the run across different regions of the country and during increasingly contemporary time periods.
The film of a performance of a selection of cabaret comedy sketches by Karl Valentin, with Jorge Silva Melo as stage director. The show was a complete success and has become almost legendary. Solveig Nordlund shot it, adding some more sketches that weren’t included on the show.
"Essay on the Military and the Power", a phrase that also belongs to the title of "Gestures & Fragments", sums up the spirit of the film, based on three points of view on the same theme: Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and Eduardo Lourenço, in their own roles, and the one played by Robert Kramer, as an...
In the 1950s, a handful of prisoners attempt a daring escape from Peniche, a castle on the north coast of Portugal for the political dissidents of the regime.
Portugal, late 1940's. André must leave the country after running away from prison. In Oporto some friends get him a guide, Lambaça, a smuggler who knows very well the Trás-os-Montes border from Portugal to Spain.
Set four years after the Portuguese revolution and the simultaneous loss of the Portuguese empire in Africa, the story concerns a director who sells guns to finance his play.
During World War II, during a misty morning, near a fishermen's village, four children come across two RAF pilots ejected from a plane that crashed in the sea.
Dina (Maria Santiago) is a teenager brought up by her grandmother, employed as a housekeeper for a fairly well-off family. Since Dina only has her grandmother, she spends her time fantasizing about her life and reading comic-book love stories -- activities that do nothing to improve her dim...
The Misadventures of Dracula Von Barreto in the Lands of the Agrarian Reform
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To the tune of "A terra a quem a trabalha", an Alentejo peasant girl is attacked by a vampire but rescued afterwards by workers and peasants armed with sickles and hammers. Filmed during the 1977 Festa do Avante, with a collective of participants linked to cinema and theatre, this film is a...