Luísa Cruz

Thirteen year-old André lives isolated with his father in the dry region of Alentejo, helping with his water well drilling business instead of going to school. When his father suddenly disappears, André must turn to the only neighbor in miles, a young mother named Sandra, as the only chance of finding him.

The story of Brazil’s first emperor, returning to Europe on board the English ship Warspite. The trip makes Pedro conquer his fears and face his life from a personal point of view. He goes back in time and relives outstanding moments of his earlier life – since his childhood, when in 1808 he arrived coming from Portugal with his family, until he left in the dead of the night, in 1831, running away from Brazil.

Pê, a man with terminal cancer, wanders through his city, Lisbon. Throughout the day, he is confronted with a reality unaware of his suffering while he prepares his imminent death by writing a farewell letter to his daughter. When emptying her father’s house, the daughter discovers the letter. It is the beginning of a new encounter.

The character of a novel gains life to torment the author, revisiting and reliving the story of a crime.

On April 25, 1974, a man walked alone in Largo do Carmo. He knocked on the GNR military barracks door and entered, unarmed and without any escorts. Inside, the Government’s chief, Marcelo Caetano, waited, surrounded by the military and the people. The man who stared at him that afternoon and demanded surrender, guaranteeing his safety, had just led Santarém’s Artillery 1 regiment in taking the capital. Without firing a single shot, he managed to overthrow a regime that was over 48 years old. That was the last step to take and he took it, without hesitation, becoming the unavoidable figure of the day that marked the beginning of democracy in Portugal

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 is a perilous year with Mussolini’s fascism, Hitler’s Nazism, Spain’s Civil War and Salazar’s New State in Portugal. And Fernando Pessoa meets his creation, Reis. Two women, Lídia and Marcenda, are Reis’ carnal and impossible passions. “Life and Death as one” allows for literature and cinema.

Can a turtle, the most pacific animal on earth, start a range of significant events that are going to forever change a couple's life? After dividing all their assets, Arnaldo e Barbara still have one decision to make before they formalize their separation: what to do with the turtle? Amongst hesitation and failed solutions, unintended burglaries, police stations, plastic natures and misunderstandings, a single turtle fate is postponing this couple's separation. Because they know that, when they give the turtle back to its natural habitat, their relationship will be over. Are they ready for that last step?

In 1917, outside the parish of Fátima, Portugal, a 10-year-old girl and her two younger cousins witness multiple visitations of the Virgin Mary, who tells them that only prayer and suffering will bring an end to World War I. As secularist government officials and Church leaders try to force the children to recant their story, word of the sighting spreads across the country, inspiring religious pilgrims to flock to the site in hopes of witnessing a miracle..

The start of Luís Rovisco’s old age isn’t exactly cheerful. Already in his sixties, he’s still roaming the country by himself, carrying out his tasks — increasingly less real — as sales director for the company SegurVale. Sadness, resignation? Not with the songs Luís makes up behind the wheel, and that take over this film from start to finish.

The film is liberally inspired by the period when Eça de Queiroz was Portuguese Consul in Cuba, when still a Spanish colony. Eça de Queiroz struggles against local authorities in his defense of Chinese workers, brought to the sugar plantations by greedy middlemen and exploited as slaves. Two parallel stories unfold, that of a Chinese girl which Eça de Queiroz saves from the clutches of one of the island’s most powerful slave owners, and the other of a romance involving a young American woman on holidays in Havana.

The story of five generations of the Austrian-Brazilian Knieps family, from the inauguration of their family-owned Great Mystical Circus in the 1910s up to the early 21st century, following both the family and the circus from their prime through to their decadence.

Two years after consorting with the wrong people cost him his job as public prosecutor, Eduardo Silva is a measly defense attorney, who works from his hotel room. Loosing a bit from her fellow-angler uncle, he gives a shot as unpaid apprentice to freshly-graduated gypsy Marcia Amaya, whom nobody would consider hiring so far, but is soon offered crossing to the office of Silva's successor as prosecutor. Their first client is common-as-muck Joana Soares, accused of murdering her beached-up husband after a public fight, without an alibi, claiming a blackout. Eduardo is countered while working out, with help from Marcia's and Joana's families, how the affair actually relates to illegal trade in medicine, with twists including the involvement of a crime lord.

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.

In 2011 Portugal began the so-called "year of the Troika" (EU, IMF and ECB budget cuts and economic restructuring), with the level of debt among the Portuguese people reaching staggering amounts and a growing number of families and companies unable to repay their installment loans. Jorge is an unemployed boxer on the verge of losing his son and his wife, who has decided to return to Brazil. As a means of paying off his debt and persuading his wife to remain in Portugal, Jorge accepts a job with a debt-collection agency, which will drag him into a world of violence and crime.

A love story between a failed musician and a girl in a dinosaur costume.

Rita is fifteen and spends the summer between warm afternoons of teenage love and party nights with her friend Sara. From Portugal to the South Pacific, the pleasures of this routine will take a turn when the young girl visits the art show of a new neighbor in the local community.

In which Scheherazade tells of how desolation invaded men : “It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport himself to escape the Guard while dreaming of prostitutes and partridges. A wounded cow will reminisce about a thousand-year-old olive tree while saying what she must say, which will sound none less than sad ! The residents of a tower block in the suburbs will save parrots and piss inside lifts while surrounded by dead people and ghosts; including in fact a dog that…”. And seeing the morning break, Scheherazade fell silent.

Every night, in danger of being beheaded, Scheherazade tells King Shahryar unfinished tales to continue them the following night, hence defying his promise of murdering his new wives after their wedding night. Scheherazade tells king Shahryar her stories but these are not those in the book. These are stories based on whatever will be happening in Portugal during the production time of the film. As in the book, these stories will be tragic and comical, with rich and poor, powerless and powerful people, filled with surprising and extraordinary events. This film will be about the reality of a disgraced country, Portugal, under the effects of a global economic crisis.

Some of the chapters from Arabian Nights are adapted to a modern Portugal in this epic.

Between February and July 1858, in the Massabielle cave, the Virgin appeared eighteen times to Bernadette Soubirous, a miserable little girl from Lourdes. A true revolution in the heart of the Second Empire that shakes the established order by his universal message of love and prayer.

Lisbon, today. In a room of a house at Douradores Street, a man invents dreams and theorizes about them. The essence of the dreams itself becomes physical, palpable, visible. The text itself materializes in its musicality. And, in front of our eyes, this music can be felt with the ears, brain and heart. It spreads itself in the street where the man lives, in the city that he loves above all and over the entire world.

In oPorto there is a club, Imperatriz, where everything is permitted. A moment in which all intersect in the dark night.

The darkness of night, a barely lit place, motorbikes flirting with danger: a group of teenagers at a crossroads playing chicken with unaware passing cars. Jota (Eduardo Frazão) stands out from this group, unclassifiable; his destiny has no straight lines save those on the asphalt. Jota lives in permanent conflict with everything and everybody in his small town. No room for stillness. And then comes Margarida (Ana Moreira). Jota has no inside, Margarida has no outside. In spite of, or because of, that, they meet. What can they do? They can just ride, they can get away with it even if its all messed up. Love is to be lived.

Three homeless teenage rejects struggle to survive together. Of them, Andreia is pregnant, while Pedro and Ricardo hustle, steal and are exploited by a pornographer.

Cape Verde, 1964. At the feet of a mighty volcano, the traditional Cape Verdean society is undergoing a steady change. The old land-owning aristocracy is disintegrating. A class of "mulattos" begins to emerge, with a trade-based financial power that threatens the landlords. A new identity arises, a mix of old and new, of African and Portuguese culture, sensual and dynamic. The songs of Cesária Évora follow this inevitable transformation. From the novel by Henrique Teixeira de Sousa.

Twenty years ago, Henrique left Portugal for the peaceful Netherlands. A colonial war veteran, he desperately wanted to get away from his country which still defended a doomed African empire and from his traditional, landowning family. He’s back now. Everything is different. «Europe» knocked on the door and sprawled itself fast. Even the South had to face wrenching changes. And Henrique himself will have to face many events. Love affairs and dangerous threats. And the chalenge of his future.

In 1870, four different stories happen in four different places in the world.