João Matos

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.

On his deathbed, his royal highness Alfredo, King without a crown, is taken back to distant youth memories and the time he dreamt of becoming a fireman. The encounter with instructor Afonso from the fire brigade, opens a new chapter in the life of the two young men devoted to love and desire, and the will to change the status quo.

From our window one can see a set of the film The Green Years, directed by Paulo Rocha in 1963. This was our starting point: guided by Rocha's gaze, we look back at the places of that film. The successive geological, urbanistic and social strata of Lisbon, besieged by the pandemic that interrupted the shooting, are drawn out in front of our camera, like a contemporary jazz impro from a score written in 1963.

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.

In 2020, unable to travel, Ico Costa left a small camera with Ailucha and Domy, two young Mozambicans from the city of Inhambane, and asked them to film their daily lives. The result: working, playing, walking, hanging around, smoking, listening to music, singing, dancing, feeling desire – being teenagers.

The couple Laura and Israël have a five-year-old son, Lucas. They live together but seem to have lost interest in one another's thoughts and cares. Their relationship seems headed for the rocks, and the only one who seems to still be looking for something from life is Lucas.

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.

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.

Amor Fati seeks out parts that complete each other. These are portraits of couples, friends, families and pets and their owners. They share the intimacy of daily life, habits, beliefs, tastes and even some physical traits. From their faces, from the choreography of their gestures, we unveil the story that binds them.

Castuera, Spain, April 1939. During the night two Falangist Guards appear at the door of the house where Paz is taking refuge with her family. They request her presence at the police station. Paz immediately understands the fatality of this visit. With no chance to escape, she asks to breastfeed her newborn daughter one last time.

Henrique lives alone in the mountains in Portugal. Having his children been taken away by the social services, one day he searches for the psychologist in charge of the process to get some sort of vengeance. From then on, he hides in the forest for several days, trying nothing but to survive.

Somewhere in the mountains, a man lives alone in a disappearing village. Wandering through the misty nature, interpreting among the walls of his dark houses, on the very ground with his destiny to belong to a world that has been rejected.

This documentary portrait covers all the themes of Daveau’s rich life: from her field research and private life to feminism and the influence of the modern age on family relationships and science. Her passionate life is examined in detail in an inexhaustible series of stunning archival photos and home videos recorded by Daveau, and in voice-over she speaks openly, extensively and full of wonder about life and the world around her.

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.

Cunning and slender, harassed and on the run, Reynard is a metaphor of a never ending obsession with each breath, each gesture, each thought. Marta seeks in the emptiness of her body a way to arrive to her inner essence, in an abstract search of a free spirit that might end in her own enclosure.

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.

Through a city that carries the weight of broken expectations and tough absencies, we follow the day of three young adults. César who got into a photoshoot by accident, Chloé who hopes to find a place to do her own work, and Helena who is back in her town for some days, only to find the living shadow of a loss.

“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.

A young woman struggles to overcome lost love, unplanned motherhood and ghostly apparitions.

In Hindu mythology, RAHU is the severed head of a demon responsible for swallowing the sun and causing the eclipses. It is also Alex Zhang Hungtai, David Maranha, Gabriel Ferrandini, Júlia Reis and Pedro Sousa, all five in the dark, in circle, vociferating to each other, with their arms their feet their nerves, a growing, raw tension, without term, sipping restlessness through a testimony of the exploratory music in contemporary Lisbon.

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.

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.

Two young Portuguese women try to put down roots in Brazil. Teresa is newly arrived; Francisca has been there a while. This sure-footed, loving portrait of two counterparts, attracting and repelling, is also an ode to Belo Horizonte: a city with no tourist attractions, but bags of atmosphere and lust for life.

(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.

Shooting on 16mm film in Mozambique, director Ico Costa explores the textures of human behaviour as he follows young men who wonder what lies beyond their immediate surroundings. In the fragments of conversations captured in the Maputo market, a recording studio and on coconut trees, we find daily routines and tedium lead to chit-chat on desire, money and hope. In the interplay between performance and document, poetry emerges from fleeting everyday moments.

Moving and mysterious, Joana Pimenta’s An Aviation Field juxtaposes the natural and the manmade as it links the great utopian modernist project of Brasilia to the volcanic crater in Fogo, Cape Verde, and offers speculative futures for a troubling past.

At dawn, a group of peasants tries to rescue the body of a young man from the inside of a well. Women veil their faces in silence while men endure the situation. In the centre of it all, a mother awaits her son's body. How can life cease to be when in nature there is an enduring renewal?

A dive, the midday sunlight filtering down through the water. The air in her lungs has to last until she can dislodge the abalone. Dives like these have been carried out in Japan for over 2000 years by the Ama-San.

The National Ballet of Portugal is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Since its foundation, it has aimed to present the great classics, as well as to always welcome contemporary creations. Day-to-day life is demanding for dancers, choreographers, musicians, répétiteurs, seamstresses, light technicians, sound technicians, and other elements of a large staff that make it possible for dance to travel through the rehearsal rooms and linger in the hallways before making it onto the stage. This film follows not only the company’s creations and premieres, but mainly each dancer’s silent and structural work.

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

The Forensic Psychiatric Hospital is a medium-security level, closed structure, with a rehabilitation component. The service provided includes psychiatric, psychological, medical, therapeutic and social care. The 32 men who inhabit the unit were considered exempt from punishment by the court. They feel time going by. Slowly. The film settles in this individual time.

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.

In Alhambra, between the mountains and the river, a train runs through the village. Oscar, forty-eight years, has worked for the last twenty-fifth years in the same factory, and finds himself awaiting for the resolution of the court on the application of the insolvency of the factory where he worked. With the suspended production and the unpaid wages, Oscar and his colleagues continue to appear daily to work hoping that they can keep their jobs.

Beside the savage desire to realize the enormities which he brooded on, nothing was sacred.

From the bride's room to the dance floor, through the situations created by photographers, we follow three couples on their wedding day. People working in the industry invite us to imagine the choices that the preparation of this day implies, the course of marriage preparation leads us to project the future that starts now: a daily life together. When looking at it - we all know how’s a wedding - All the Days of Our Lives tries to think about the desires that guide our life choices, ideals of love, having a family, belonging to the community.

4 months after Gezi process the workers from Kazova occupied the factory.

A film about a show and the issues the players face during their collective artistic work. Will we ever be able to leave our cocoons towards a collective movement? How strongly do we believe in those who should lead us? How strongly do they believe in us? We try… We fall… We rise… We try once again… Will we ever make it?

This film tries to make a silent record of the arrival of an economy of scale, its flows, and its effects upon the transformation of an island’s physical and human landscape.

New Opportunities were a portuguese education program with a focus on the academic certification of adults who left school early. Applicants will improve their academic degree from the re-elaboration and re-interpretation of his "life experience." These processes motivated workers to reflect on their working conditions, their training, their roots, producing a plurality of views about the school, emigration, the rural world and the universe of employment. Having its protagonists stories as a starting point, the film approches into a reflection about work in the contemporay world. This film was produced over four years work by the film director in a New Opportunities Centre.

Two lovers hit the road for a holiday. They find a car that has been hit, and a dead woman by the accident. Two production assistants try to leave the set, but all the roads seem to hit the same spot, where they find a dead woman that walks.

The Ave Valley is, for more than a century, a territory seized by an imposing industry. Amongst ruins and operating factories, we descend the river on a journey alongside the banks of the present, unveiling the marks of the past.

A director gathers all the pieces he needs to make his film: a set, an actor, a writer, a director of photography, a studio, a script, a director.

A director gathers all the pieces he needs to make his film: a set, an actor, a writer, a director of photography, a studio, a script, a director.

In 1975, Thomas Harlan's crew filmed Torre Bela's homestead occupation, in the center of Portugal. Three decades later, RED LINE revisits this emblematic film of the Portuguese revolutionary period: in which way did Harlan interfered in the events that seems to naturally develop in front of the camera? What was the impact of the film on the lives of the occupants and the memory of that period?

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

“There must be a different solution than the one from hell’. Full unadulterated terror (and music). 'The best class always ends with a lesson'. Almost baroque in its ambition and detail, Akerman and Seabra Lopes’ mesmerising short film delves deeply into the hard-wired dread of music lessons. Sewn around Schubert’s steely Opus 1, which is itself based on the no less terrifying legend of Goethe's Erlkönig, their film is a revelation.” International Film Festival Rotterdam.

The atelier of the painter Gonçalo Pena merges into his work. The space's occupation is divided between the solitary and silent moments devoted to painting and the shared moments devoted to conversations with all those who visit him.

Paris, March 1939. While the march of the Nazi troops makes itself heard throughout Europe, exiled artists and intellectuals from all over the world still converge in the French capital. Portuguese composer Fernando Lopes-Graça is among them, sharing this cosmopolitan environment, on the verge of rupture. A happy coincidence brings him into the presence of the man he considers his master, the intransigent Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. For Lopes-Graça, the occasion presents itself as a unique opportunity to show Bartók his scores...

A nurse takes care of a patient in her house. Maria do Céu has been a nurse for more than forty years, working at an old Hospital in Lisbon. She was sixteen, when she arrived to Lisbon, coming from a small village in Alentejo. At the Hospital, she reads the file of an old patient who was also her friend. The file is then closed. Maria do Céu returns to her village, where she sings at the people’s house choir.

Documentary about the work of the painter António Sena and a way to see the transformation of forms over time

A father and a son. The father will be seventy years old, the son is in his twenties. The son drives the father to the hospital. Classical music in the radio. The father did not know that the son liked classical music, and the son did not know that that would be the last time he would speak to his father. But Mozart asks that souls rejoice, that men rejoice.

Documentary on the work of Helena Almeida, a plastic artist that, since the end of the 60s, has developed a body of work in which she explores the limits of self-representation and the frontiers of the different mediums she uses, be it painting, drawing, photography or video. "Pintura Habitada" focuses on the several phases and elements involved in the creative process through which Helena Almeida constructs her works, from the first studies to the exhibition of the completed work.

They thought life would be simple. All material problems would be overcome. Every morning it would be good to have breakfast together, the table laid. It would be the beginning of a long day at work. The daily ritual of a house inhabited by a mother and the two-year-old daughter. The automatism of the gestures of material life and its suspension in small events.

They thought life would be simple. All material problems would be overcome. Every morning it would be good to have breakfast together, the table laid. It would be the beginning of a long day at work. The daily ritual of a house inhabited by a mother and the two-year-old daughter. The automatism of the gestures of material life and its suspension in small events.

"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."

In Cape Verde, in a very isolated fishing village long cut off from the world, a man survives from day to day by eating shells that he fishes with flintstones along the rocky coast, a dangerous and difficult activity. Hustled by the swell of the ocean and bathed in the mist of the sea spray, he fishes with a childhood friend, a woman who fears nothing. They both live in precarious conditions. They struggle to get by and hope their situation will improve thanks to the tourism development that is underway. They are looking for a way to benefit from the influx of tourists who are coming to their village in ever increasing numbers to trek and fish for blue marlin, the "cheetah of the seas".