Vasco Viana

Yurt districts of Ulaanbaatar. Grandpa Spirit is a powerful shaman, well known for helping the poor and downtrodden in the neighbourhood. When Marla, a 16-year-old overprotected and lonely girl with congenital heart problems comes to Grandpa Spirit for help, she is surprised and amused to find Ze, an awkward 17-year-old teenager, underneath the fearsome dressing of the shaman. She beats him at video games and teases him with sexually graphic manga books. Ze is entranced. The teens find in each other outlets for repressed hormones and first-time experiences. In between stolen kisses, Ze carries out his duty as the comforter to the lost people of the city. When Marla dies, Ze faces the ephemeral nature of life and love, as well as the limits of his powers and tradition. Ze rejects his spirit and dives into the uncertainty of teenage life, struggling to juggle overbearing parents, an impending graduation, a pregnant sister, and a relentless bully.

Two men and a bird, trapped in a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere, try to solve a mystery while it slowly devours them.

In 1974, after years of civil war, the Portuguese and their descendants fled the colony of Angola where independentist groups gradually claimed their territory back. A tribal girl discovers love and death when her path crosses that of a young Portuguese soldier. Meanwhile, another group of Portuguese soldiers is barracked inside an infinite wall from which they will have to escape once the past comes out of the grave to claim its long-awaited justice.

Eva is struggling to live happily with her autistic son Felix. The two are inseparable, but Felix's frequent outbursts of anger, the constant problems at school and his fear of strangers are almost impossible for Eva to cope with. One day when Felix accidentally seriously injured Eva, suddenly nothing is the same as it used to be.

World renowned performer Cesária Évora’s voice took her from poverty to stardom. With previously unseen footage and insights into the singer’s life, the film follows her struggles and success.

One night on Viva FM's late night show, host Vitor Lobo gets a phone call from an old friend.

Maria starts to show signs of wanting to belong somewhere else: scales appear on her skin, roots appear on her legs, and she hears the sound of water - she dreams of being a fish. One day her daughter comes across her disappearance and reconstructs, through the memory of her gestures and meetings with her mother, a possible explanation for her escape.

A nun is called upon to adopt her 15-year-old nephew, and as a consequence religious, familial and sensual love become entangled.

Candide is a cold and seductive serial killer who, after kissing a girl who just jumped off a balcony, becomes a superstar under the world's microscope.

Several stories of love and hope, united by invisible threads. There are those who call these threads magic, some who call them destiny. What matters is that they will lead all of our characters to the same outcome, on the same day: Christmas Eve

Patrick, 20-years-old, lives in Paris with his older boyfriend. He runs a teenage pornography website, which results in a prison sentence following a raid at a party. Mário, 8-years-old, was kidnapped 12 years ago in Portugal. Patrick and Mário are the same person with two conflicting identities: a life in Paris filled with parties, drugs, and promiscuity and a new rural life in Portugal, where he feels obliged to reconnect with a broken family.

A dark comedy about a family of five brothers, a single and unemployed mother, and a grandmother. They live tight in a small apartment in Benfica. Everything gets complicated on the day when the emblematic Sardoal FC mascot escapes and the club is at risk of losing the championship..

A journey through Lisbon’s suburbs through the lives of a handful of musicians establishing their place to exist in a city of complex identity struggles. Different generations and backgrounds meet, Angola to São Tome, Cabo Verde and Guine Bissau represented by old musicians and young producers.

A journey through Lisbon’s suburbs through the lives of a handful of musicians establishing their place to exist in a city of complex identity struggles. Different generations and backgrounds meet, Angola to São Tome, Cabo Verde and Guine Bissau represented by old musicians and young producers.

A journey through Lisbon’s suburbs through the lives of a handful of musicians establishing their place to exist in a city of complex identity struggles. Different generations and backgrounds meet, Angola to São Tome, Cabo Verde and Guine Bissau represented by old musicians and young producers.

They all say that you killed an Angel. Who says that ? They. It’s not an Angel. It isn’t ? No. It’s a rare bird, just like you and me.

In an impoverished country, rife with contradiction, a young girl is torn between her obligation to her family and the influence of foreign visitors. Ashmina, 13, lives at the outskirts of Pokhara Nepal. Her home, nestled between a beautiful lake and the Himalayas, happens to be the paragliding capital of the world. Forced to skip school, she helps her family make ends meet by working at the landing field in return for small change.

Miguel —alias Tibars, alias “Djon África,” born and raised in Portugal— is a kindhearted Rastafarian who loves women and lives a carefree life. Until one day a stranger tells him he's the spitting image of his father, “a player and a crook.” His father, whom he never even knew! This intriguing discovery makes him change tack. Particularly when his grandmother, who always took care of him, finally tells him how his father was in prison; how sad Miguel was as a toddler when he couldn't see him; how his father was banished to Cape Verde. Miguel goes there to visit him. Who is this man?

“Campo de Marte” (The Field of Mars) was in the ancient times Rome’s training arena for war. At the outskirts of Lisbon, “Campo” hosts today Europe’s largest military base. In this place military troops train fictional missions, astronomy aficionados observe the stars and a boy plays the piano for the wild deers lurking in the dark.

Gabriel and Iris head back to their family holiday home in Portugal with their daughters Emma and Zoé, a couple of adorable six-year-old twins, for a vacation. In the heart of the sun-drenched countryside, as the little ones swim and laugh, the couple’s past begins to rear its head. Emma is overwhelmed by a secret that is simply too big for her to keep, and which she has no right to share with her twin sister.

One night, a group of workers realises that the administration is stealing machines and raw materials from their own factory. As they organize to survey the equipment and block the relocation of production, they are forced to stand at their posts with no work to do, as a form of retaliation, while negotiations over general lay-offs take place. The pressure leads to a breakdown of the workers along with the world around them.

Alone and far from home, The Kid makes his way through a strange city looking for the means to get through his day. Surrounded by predators he is forced to make compromises merely to survive, his life of exile grows one day longer.

Wayward boy punishes his mother’s lover. Beauty and horror fondle each other. Young gods callously abjure conventional morality. Death goes whoring in child’s guise. Living in a world of role play, Miguel spends all his time playing with his sister Clara. They have a close bond that is made even more intense by Clara's illness. Yet despite all his efforts, Miguel senses that there's something missing in Clara's life that he cannot give her. Time is running out, and her health is deteriorating. One evening, he decides to approach a young man.

End of adolescence, end of school, the last summer before joining the working world for a group of friends from the neighbourhood of Alcoitão, "BDA".

Karlon, born in Pedreira dos Húngaros (a slum in the outskirts of Lisbon) and a pioneer of Cape Verdean creole rap, runs away from the housing project to which he had been relocated.

(within the project URB) CIDADE is a TV series that takes place in the diverse, urbanistically chaotic and multicultural periphery of Lisbon. Each episode has for landscape and dramatic background the everyday-life in the social housing neighborhoods and shanty towns of Lisbon. It explores the infinite possibilities of narratives and characters generated by the daily confrontation of the normal life of the city with several layers of cultural heritages and lifestyles, brought by different waves of migration. A network of interconnected characters, families and ties makes the narrative to evolve and illustrates the cultural, artistic, social and economic explosion that we are about to live in here.

Mother and son move into a new house, a new city, a new story.

Day breaks on the eighth floor in a suburban neighbourhood of Lisbon and 14-year-old Bruno’s grandfather is still in hospital. Doctors give him only a few days to live. The imminence of death and the void that it will leave force Bruno to become the man of the house, where he lives with his mother Mónica, who is in her 30s, and his three-year-old sister Érica.

The portrait of a community as they face their country's economic recession.

An elderly woman in a wheelchair and a hormone driven teenage boy arrive to a beach cabin where, through rare moments of lucidity, she will persuade him to kill her.

Sebastian is a wealthy young man. He finds out he has a flat tire and ends up accepting help from a Gypsy passer by. In return Sebastian will have to give him a ride home - but they won't reach their expected destination.

A man lives isolated in his grandmother's country-house in an attempt to recover from a tragic event involving his family. His lonely and silent days are spent with an unnameable hope.

While observing others, Paula is also, herself, observed. ' Know the difference between an old maid and a spinster? The old maid does not have a choice. '

A portrait of the daily lives of young people living in a new-built estate on the outskirts of Lisbon. School is a joke and there’s no work to be had anyway, so the girls try to have fun as best they can. New-girl Eva is very pretty but quiet. The others aren’t sure at first whether she’s arrogant or just shy. Iara and Eva head off to the beach with two boys. The lads turn a couple of abandoned shopping trolleys into racing chariots for them and the atmosphere begins to tingle. Later, they argue with the rest of the group. The other girls manage to get into a club that night but the boys don’t and must kick their heels outside. They’re bent on revenge. They meet up with Eva and go back to her place.

In a mountain village in the north of Portugal, a murder occurred. A sixteen-year-old boy leaves the house barefoot, under the cold night, towards the forest. For thirty kilometres he walks, up and down the mountain. He has one single thought in his head.

We wanted to make a film about a teenage mother. We met Joana in a casting that took place in Setubal, in the Bela Vista neighborhood. She appeared to us as a porcelain doll, small, fragile, pale, with a little hair bow. Little by little, she crumbled apart, revealing a charming complexity. We were conquered by the duality of strength and fragility, freedom and incarceration, joy and sorrow. The intimacy and complicity we were able to establish with her made this film possible. In Cat's Cradle, we share her with everyone else.

Developing from an idea of diptych, the story of Anajara and Allison is told from two perspectives in continuity. If late night work complicates the life of one of them, the incarceration in jail of the other determines a cycle of separation. Salaviza's skill to direct amateur actors is showed in this film, one of his more precise works.

Rafa is a 13 years old kid concerned with his mother, held in a police station for driving without a license. The director shows a day in the life of a teenager who lives on a problematic area and discovers that her mother was arrested because of an automobile accident.

Lives being lived, words, gestures, gazes cross our paths, amidst a chaos en framed by a rectangular grid of windows and balconies. Rows of buildings interconnected by corridors perched over courtyards. Each ones property off their private slice of the view. The geometry of the life of a neighborhood: Bela Vista.

The mountain burns in the August heat. A firefighter falls, swallowed by the ground. The broken body survives as it can. Outside, the night descends.

Generation Orchestra is a portrait of the impact of an initiative by the same name students from the Miguel Torga School, in Amadora. The initiative was inspired by the international project Orquestra Simon Bolivar, the apex of the National Network of Youth and Children's Orchestras of Venezuela. Ana, Daniel, Diogo and Monica take part in Generation Orchestra and devote themselves to a project that breaks with the formatted context of public schooling and becomes an indispensable part of their lives. From the onset, starting with Drama classes, we discover their dreams, their relationship with music and their sense of truly belonging to a group.

In one afternoon Rafael’s paradise becomes a spiral of guilt and paranoia.

In one afternoon Rafael’s paradise becomes a spiral of guilt and paranoia.

Casa Na Comporta is one of four films commissioned to different directors for the Portuguese architecture national exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

A young man under house arrest spends his time in the best way he can by making some tattoos. His relative peace is strangely disturbed when he's attacked and robbed by three kids from the neighborhood. From then on, he'll try to find the kids who took his money and maybe give them a lesson. But with those actions, comes the reflection of how things were and are in this place filled with violence and hostility. Is change possible?

"I've been on this cliff for almost a year, here on the lookout. Always aware of the sea and the enemy, even though I've never seen him. The man riding a horse gave me a new order, to be even more on alert, waiting for a mirage, for a ghost that will not come."