Nádia Santos Henriques

Ana was born in São Miguel, an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean ruled by religion and traditions. Growing up as the middle child of a family of three with her mother and grandmother. Early Ana realized that girls and boys were given different tasks. Through her friendship with Luis, her queer best friend who loves dresses as much as pants, Ana questions the world that is promised to her. When her friend Cloé arrives from Canada, bringing with her the glowing days of youth, Ana embarks on a journey that will take her beyond the horizon.

A hotel by the northern shore of Portugal welcomes its guests over the weekend. A man is torn between being present for his wife and the space that his mother takes up between the two of them. A mother encourages her daughter’s marriage to enable her own love affair with her son-in-law. Another mother lives through her daughter, preventing her from making her own decisions. Three families at the end of their cycles of acceptance.

In a family-run hotel, by the Portuguese northern shore, lives a group of women from different generations of the same family, whose relationships with each other have grown poisoned by bitterness. They try to survive in the declining hotel, as the unexpected arrival of a granddaughter to this oppressive space stirs trouble, reviving latent hatred and piled-up resentments.

In a family-run hotel, by the Portuguese northern shore, lives a group of women from different generations of the same family, whose relationships with each other have grown poisoned by bitterness. They try to survive in the declining hotel, as the unexpected arrival of a granddaughter to this oppressive space stirs trouble, reviving latent hatred and piled-up resentments.

'In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the belongings of each guest of the hotel and observed through the details, lives that will remain unknown', says the temporary Chambermaid in a large seaside hotel, which, unable to communicate, lives through a rigid methodology of analysis of the exterior and a ritualised quotidian. Until the uncontrollable comes to disrupts this dynamic. Hotel Royal is fragmented and incomplete mosaic of contemporary societies. It could be dubbed a film about the horrors of the soul, about voyeurs or simply about misfits.

At 63 years old and almost retired, Joaquim is forced to follow job centre rules so he can collect unemployment benefits. Despite knowing that he will never return to active life, he must go from company to company asking for stamps to attest that he is looking for work. In these trips he reminisces about his life as an immigrant to the U.S., where he worked as a cab driver in New York and witnessed numerous Wall Street crashes.

At 63 years old and almost retired, Joaquim is forced to follow job centre rules so he can collect unemployment benefits. Despite knowing that he will never return to active life, he must go from company to company asking for stamps to attest that he is looking for work. In these trips he reminisces about his life as an immigrant to the U.S., where he worked as a cab driver in New York and witnessed numerous Wall Street crashes.

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.

Maria spends her daytime sewing and cleaning, while at night she works as a prostitute in Oporto's streets. Years ago her path crossed with José, a married man who became her most faithful client but who couldn't help her to escape the hard life. Today this old prostitute continues showing off her body through the long city's nights, though the clients are almost gone. José is still there, but he failed at what she desired the most: a son. In a very intimate and raw portray of a woman, MARIA disclosures how love and getting older can feels like.

A woman returns. Now that the night has fallen, a storm approaches.

Paulo works as night security in a deactivated industrial complex. He lost his daughter in dramatic circumstances, and no regrets would console him. He sleeps at Luisa's house and witnesses the repeated transgressions of an unstable neighbour. Everything threatens to crack.

Bound by a silent pact, five students make a secret trip to the country for what seems to be an initiation ceremony. In threatening landscapes and abandoned ruins, they submit to the strange rituals of their leader, the Dux.

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.

It's a summer weekend in a country house near Sintra, in Portugal. Fourteen-year-old Nicolau is spending a couple of days with his older brother Simão and his friends, all of them in their late twenties. Everyone is drawn to the beautiful and quiet Maria do Mar, but Nicolau will see his life the most deeply shaken by her. Between homework and tree-climbing, stories about a deceased philandering grandfather and the origins of the tortellini's shape, a friend in a costume nursing a broken heart and seduction games, Nicolau observes this group of young adults.

A young adolescent, living with a swinger couple in a campsite, meets an emotionally unstable man and finds herself fascinated by his special powers.

Mariana is a young woman looking to fulfill the dream she was once committed with when she left her parents’ house to live with Alex, in Lisbon. When he leaves to New York, she cannot bear what has been left for her. Even though the return seemed unthinkable, she goes back to the North. The burden of failure and the crossing of a legendary river, lead her to an ancient tale: once you cross the river of forgetfulness, your own past will also be forgotten. Alex returns while she is searching for a new setting for herself. He no longer believes in this country. She has gotten closer to the place where everything has started for her. He will leave. She will not return.

After her daughter's death, Rita returns to the African country of her childhood to investigate the death of Yvone Kane, a former political activist and guerrilla fighter. There, she becomes embroiled in a journey into the past of a land haunted by war and evil.

According to the perpetual lunar calendar: 'When sparks catch a pot of water, it signifies wind. When the hills echo loudly and the sea generates great noise, it signifies tempestuous winds and storms at sea. When dense fog forms at dawn, it signals two days' serenity.' Let’s wait and see.

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.

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.

A woman and two dogs inside a city house. She rediscovers herself in daily gestures and in the remembrance of whom has left. The sun blinds her, it becomes fierce, and like death, she cannot look it in the eye - only to the shadows around her

The short life of the Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini is colourfully portrayed, not as a conventional biopic, but as a visual poem which evokes the turbulent life and complex personality of the literary heroine as she develops her genius for writing.

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

On a summer's day, a mother, daughter and granddaughter's care-free day trip comes to an abrupt end. Beautiful and restrained.

Five lives cross each other in the labyrinth of the suburbs in search of their redemption.

An homage to Pina Bausch.

Summer of 1982, a beach in the south of Portugal. Rui and his parents live closed in their worlds, blind to the failure that characterizes them as a family and condemns them to the malaise of survival. Rui will have school exams but he is only interested in music and in the exploration of imaginary worlds that he constantly sketches in drawings. Only Joana seems capable of pulling him out of his autism. The girl's vitality fascinates him.

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?

A bizarre and tragic ballad of an impossible love between a nameless topographer and Leonor in a swamp soon to be destroyed by the forces of Man. She (Teresa Salgueiro, ethereal voice of Madredeus) is the “swamp-flower”, protégée of a Socratic Director (and his goat Plato). In a world without women, she is kept safe from the temptations of the flesh by her strict and grotesque Aunt. The sound-track entirely played by the workers (fado and bossa nova singers) reveals parallel narratives of suspicion and conspiracy that unfold to the pace of the unconscious leading to a confrontation between Man and River. Inspired by a hypnotic story by Branquinho da Fonseca (1905-1974).

After breaking up with her boyfriend, a woman named Odete descends into madness and claims to be pregnant with the child of her neighbour Pedro, who died in a car crash and is mourned by his boyfriend Rui.

A man is seen by a prostitute in his home. They try to communicate. But the loneliness they both carry creates a gap between them, enabling that communication.