Olivier Blanc

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.

Paul and Adèle were once lovers and separated but are still good friends, one year after everything seems to take them away from each other. The key of E-flat may be the key of true friendship, but it is Mozart that pushes them apart...

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.

'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.

Film adaptation of "The letter from the hunchback to the locksmith" by Fernando Pessoa's heteronym Maria José.

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.

The Gardner family moves to a remote farmstead in rural New England to escape the hustle of the 21st century. They are busy adapting to their new life when a meteorite crashes into their front yard, melts into the earth, and infects both the land and the properties of space-time with a strange, otherworldly colour. To their horror, the family discovers this alien force is gradually mutating every life form that it touches—including them.

Two film directors and a writer are in Portugal for an expedition through various images, moments from the history of Western allegorical representation. The writer is Jean-Louis Schefer, and this tale encapsulates his life’s mission.

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.

North of Italy, the von Kettens dispute the forces of the Episcopate of Trent. Herr Ketten seeks marriage in a distant country, Portugal. After their honeymoon journey back home, Ketten leaves again for the war. Eleven years elapsed… Rumours are running about the presence of that 'foreigner' in the castle. Some say she's a heretic. Until one day, the Bishop of Trento ends up dying and, with the signature of peace, falls the background of von Ketten's life. Will the Portuguese win, where death seems to be moving in?

A disgraced soccer star seeks redemption but is exploited by a variety of causes hoping to capitalize on his celebrity.

Alentejo, Portugal, 1950. In a desolate region, where the wind seems to speak, where misery and hunger reign over poorest, a desperate man takes his revenge on those who caused his ruin during the darkest night, unable to get honestly the bread needed to feed his family in the daylight.

Inspired on the true events of the Portuguese king Don Pedro (14th Century) which unburied his mistress to make her queen after dead. This film tells the story of Pedro, a man admitted to a psychiatric hospital for traveling by car with the corpse of his beloved, recalling simultaneously three different lives: one from the past, another from nowadays and another one from an distopic future.

A few months before WW2 a family is torn apart: Maria goes to Timor, her brothers to Portugal. After Japan invaded Timor and Maria is sent to a prisoner’s camp, her family fears the worst. A documentary about a silenced period in Portuguese history.

Which language shall we use to tell the stories we have been told? In which language shall we write a declaration of love? Lisbon, Bairro das Colónias, third floor. Conveying and translating an insightful encounter between different worlds, Fatumata and Aissato, mother and daughter, discuss love and the happiness. Their feelings have been determined by narratives and languages acquired at different stages of life and in different places. At 7pm, from the third to the fifth floor, where I live, a regular sound, always the same, like the beating of a heart, reverberates through the building.

After the Carnation Revolution the peasants in the Alentejo region occupied the huge proprieties where they were once submitted to the power of their masters. The protagonists of this film, resistants of this struggle, tell their story to the youngsters of today, in their own words.

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.

Manuel Teixeira Gomes the Portuguese President who left everything behind with only one premise: become who he really wanted to be

Jorge de Sena was forced to leave his country. First he moved to Brazil, and later to the USA. He never returned to Portugal. During his 20-year-long exile, he kept an epistolary correspondence with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. These letters are a testimony of the profound friendship between the two poets, letters of longing and of desire to “fill years of distance with hours of conversation”. Through excerpts and verses, a dialog is established, revealing their divergent opinions but mostly their strong bond, and their efforts to preserve it until their last breaths.

Jorge de Sena was forced to leave his country. First he moved to Brazil, and later to the USA. He never returned to Portugal. During his 20-year-long exile, he kept an epistolary correspondence with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. These letters are a testimony of the profound friendship between the two poets, letters of longing and of desire to “fill years of distance with hours of conversation”. Through excerpts and verses, a dialog is established, revealing their divergent opinions but mostly their strong bond, and their efforts to preserve it until their last breaths.

The lives of two women intersect.

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.

While the young captains lead the revolution in the streets, the people of Fontainhas search for Ventura, lost in the woods.

1920s. Vitalino, a small farmer from São Vicente sees his father die of the epidemic which decimated the country. Some years later, of all the brothers, Vitalino is the strongest and takes his father’s place in the house. But the village is too small for his aspirations and he decides to head to Brazil, leaving his sisters in charge of the household. In parallel with Vitalino’s story, If I Were a Thief… I’d Steal portrays the world of Paulo Rocha rummaging through his films and ghosts over the years.

Four voices and their visions of Guimarães, cradle city of the Portuguese nation and European Capital of Culture in 2012.

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.

A regular family living in the outskirts of Lisbon sees the serenity of their lives shaken beyond any remedy within a week.

Maria, a Ukrainian doctor, comes to Portugal to spend a year with Greco, her husband who is also a doctor. Upon arrival at Faro airport she is the only person from Kiev approached by agents of Immigration and Customs that lead her to a room of interrogation, without any explanations. All this occurs because the authorities suspect that something illegal should be behind her trip, since she is from Eastern Europe and her husband is Senegalese.

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

The story of a man who sees his life change radically upon confronting his progressive loss of memory. As his neurological condition advances, it affects not only his own life but the lives of all those who surround him.

Humberto hanged himself. Catarina, Paulo and Victor want the company where Humberto used to work for to take responsibility in his death, leading them to kidnappe the company’s director in an act of despair. Who is Humberto? What company is that? In which paths will he take us, after his death? Cinerama is an edgy, enigmatic, but not distant film that brings up genres of cinema as well as other forms of art like dance, theatre and poetry. The film reflects ways of being in life.

A story about art and educated men, and how their art and culture reveal themselves useless in the face of the harsh realities of the 20th century life.

Lúcia is misbegotten, unloved and the eternal widow of her own father. A cry of rage in bodily form, she is mad, maltreated and humbled. She wears mourning in remembrance of her mothers crime and betrayal, and gives vent to her inconsolable pain to make sure theres no rest or respite for the killers of her father. She lives in hope of her brothers return so she can fulfil her promise of avenging her fathers blood.

Previously focused on Asian directors, “Jeonju Digital Project 2007” takes a look at Europe. The Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, and the French filmmaker Eugène Green participated in this project.

A man has to sell the home he has spent such happy times in. His daughters have grown up and left. Reluctantly, he shows the house for some buyers: a young couple with a kid. When they arrive, in love and so happy, the house owner sees a reflection of himself years before. This unexpected glimpse of his past makes handing over somehow easier to bear…

After the Portuguese government demolishes his slum and relocates him to a housing project on the outskirts of Lisbon, 75-year-old Cape Verde immigrant Ventura wanders between his new and old homes, reconnecting with people from his past.

Arriving in a hotel in the city of Faro, a couple learns there are no available tables left. When another couple agrees to share a table, they spark a conversation on the city’s history, unfolding the tales of King Afonso III, who betrays his wife, and of a Moorish woman, who betrays her father.

A documentary about Álvaro Siza Vieira in Cape Verde and his project to restore the old town of Ribeira Grande, the first city to be built by the Portuguese in Cape Verde on the island of Santiago in 1462.

Lisboners (people of Lisbon) celebrates the ancient notion of citizenship, the right to the city in the making, in each migrant’s daily life, living and working. It is set in Lisbon but it happens in London, New York, Paris, Rome… anywhere. The Lisboners are people from Brazil, Guiné-Bissau, Nigeria, China, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, Ukraine, Moldavia, Russia, and Estonia.

A fairy tale from the computer age: a 15 year-old boy finds a computer, which has the magical power of undoing short periods of his life.

"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."