Marta Pessoa

We stare at mirrors as if 'image' was a weapon of self-defense. At night, I hide in actors' dressing rooms for a working class experience. By day, I face an old theatre being razed to the ground, making way for a parking lot. Graffitis have curtains, the nose cap of an umbrella arises from a mount of sand. Oh, Happy Days! No need to stage anything! The bulldozer is a dinosaur whose teeth and gracious neck swings by a EU flag. In the boxes, we await the audience. Sometimes, nobody comes. Lost in a symbolic show of reality, I can only watch the world's end because all the endangered species perform and a reflecting labyrinth of life stories breaks through the glass of the Economic Eating Machine. Even when the sky is falling, theatre will always happen. So, choose the right place.

We stare at mirrors as if 'image' was a weapon of self-defense. At night, I hide in actors' dressing rooms for a working class experience. By day, I face an old theatre being razed to the ground, making way for a parking lot. Graffitis have curtains, the nose cap of an umbrella arises from a mount of sand. Oh, Happy Days! No need to stage anything! The bulldozer is a dinosaur whose teeth and gracious neck swings by a EU flag. In the boxes, we await the audience. Sometimes, nobody comes. Lost in a symbolic show of reality, I can only watch the world's end because all the endangered species perform and a reflecting labyrinth of life stories breaks through the glass of the Economic Eating Machine. Even when the sky is falling, theatre will always happen. So, choose the right place.

"The Lurking Fear" interviews Portuguese citizens whose lives where hit by the torture of its fascist political police.

"The Lurking Fear" interviews Portuguese citizens whose lives where hit by the torture of its fascist political police.

"The Lurking Fear" interviews Portuguese citizens whose lives where hit by the torture of its fascist political police.

"The Lurking Fear" interviews Portuguese citizens whose lives where hit by the torture of its fascist political police.

In Lisbon 1950, John, 13, decides to invade the neighborhood of prostitutes, nobility and sailors, starting a new stage in his life. Today this neighborhood is reflected in a scattered public debate centered on its night life.

In early 1985, the writer Nuno Bragança hands his friend Carlos Antunes a 13 question’s questionnaire; 13 sheets of graph paper, of which he offered the recto-verso of each for his friend to answer. The questions were about Carlos Antunes’ personal and political career, with a special interest in his involvement in the Revolutionary Brigades and the armed struggle against the dictatorship that led to his arrest in 1978. The untimely death of the writer, in the same year, left the questionnaire unanswered and some uncertainty as to its purpose. After almost 30 years, the director asks Carlos Antunes to answer the 13 questions and to reconstruct the achievements, illusions and sorrows of the Revolutionary Brigades in Portugal, in the years surrounding the Carnations’ Revolution in 1974.

Documentary about the work and life of António Ole, one of the most notable contemporary artists from Angola.

What would you take with you if you had to leave home without knowing if you would come back? Between 1974 and 1976, nearly 300 thousand Portuguese had to leave Angola. More than 100 thousand were born there. This is the story of the incredible escapes from Angola by land, sea and air. And of everything that they didn't want to leave behind.

Documentary about the life of the lyric singer Natália de Andrade.

50 years after its beginning, it's still a delicate and hermetic subject today, based on an exclusively male speech, as if veterans were war's only owners and victims. When a country is at war though, is there anybody left out? Warriors is a generation's war movie, told by those who were left behind to wait, those who chose to be there and those who ran to rescue the soldiers from the battle's front lines. A female insight on war.

50 years after its beginning, it's still a delicate and hermetic subject today, based on an exclusively male speech, as if veterans were war's only owners and victims. When a country is at war though, is there anybody left out? Warriors is a generation's war movie, told by those who were left behind to wait, those who chose to be there and those who ran to rescue the soldiers from the battle's front lines. A female insight on war.

Documentary about the old people living in the highest floors of old buildings with no lifts, in Lisbon.

Documentary about the old people living in the highest floors of old buildings with no lifts, in Lisbon.

In greater Lisbon area, the name Cova da Moura has never been synonymous with well-being, education or prosperity. on the contrary, it has always been associated with the idea of violence, insecurity, danger or, at best, with lack of education and sheer poverty. Cova da Moura Island follows this neighbourhood's daily life, finding the cape verdean reflections in it and searching for the ways in which social exclusion is fought or perpetuated in the lives of its residents.

The paths of pain are populated by men and women of all ages, suffering from lack of affection, lack of money, mental problems, alcoholism and drug addiction, or they are simply people who have come to Portugal in search of a life that is a little better. On the other side of this path there is a veritable anthill of volunteers, social welfare workers and different technical assistants who construct and maintain support structures, some of them thinking of better days, and others institutionalising this help without believing that the phenomenon can be cured.

Woman seeks house to domesticate. Wants sensitive, versatile space, any age, with sense of humour. Offers availability of feelings. Has references. Schedule to be arranged.

A hundred letters written by Portuguese women during the Salazar dictatorship were found by chance in a second-hand bookshop. By confronting today the women who wrote these letters with the ghosts of the past, and revealing important archive material, Letters to a Dictatorship takes us on an in-depth journey through the obscurantism that dominated Portugal for more than 50 years.

Dawn is breaking into day. Fair day. As in every year. But this is a year of mourning. "It doesn't look right!" Vera says to her sister. And her mother-in-law looks at her and remembers the dead son. Remembrance is a silence between the two of them. Children's voices come from outside. Lucia wants to go to the fair with her uncle and cousin. "You promised!" claims the daughter. Vera consents in letting her go. Lucia waves her hand as the tractor drives away. Chance, once again. An accident. Death, always so close, so alive.

Dawn is breaking into day. Fair day. As in every year. But this is a year of mourning. "It doesn't look right!" Vera says to her sister. And her mother-in-law looks at her and remembers the dead son. Remembrance is a silence between the two of them. Children's voices come from outside. Lucia wants to go to the fair with her uncle and cousin. "You promised!" claims the daughter. Vera consents in letting her go. Lucia waves her hand as the tractor drives away. Chance, once again. An accident. Death, always so close, so alive.

Emilia is a writer, living in Lisbon in the year 1959. She is the “Damsel Warrior”, a fictional woman composed from the literary universes of Maria Judite de Carvalho and Irene Lisboa, writers of the city and the characters that inhabit it.