Carloto Cotta

Thirty-something Vítor still lives with his mother, Fátima, in his grandmother Júlia’s apartment. Fátima is a hairdresser with a quiet disposition who, at night, fantasises about the policeman who has just moved in next door. By day, Vítor is a lowly employee on a TV show. But at night, he dons his neighbour’s uniform to win the favour and satisfy the desires of a boy he’s met online. In her retirement home, Júlia is unable to sleep at night and has long forgotten what drugs she is meant to be taking. She misses her dead husband, who manifests himself in the body of a living friend, and gets involved in her daily activities. Through these characters, Diogo Costa Amarante constructs a fascinating portrait of lives lived while desires remain unrealised.

@nobody cams on social media under the virtual persona of a sweet and sexy anime doll. But the girl underneath the colorful costumes is scared to leave her apartment and doesn't have any friends.

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

In an isolated mountain village in 19th century Macedonia, a young feral witch accidentally kills a peasant. She assumes the peasant's shape to see what life is like in her skin, igniting a deep seated curiosity to experience life inside the bodies of others.

'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.

Crista, Carloto and João are building an airy greenhouse for butterflies in the garden. The three of them share household routines, day after day… And they are not the only ones.

For her newly commissioned video "Night 4 Day," Wardill has used the fake relationship between a mother and a son to think about what would happen if a communist revolutionary gave birth to a techno utopian, if gender as performitivity was thought through the lens of women making the political decision to live clandestinely in Portugal for a larger part of the 20th century and if the "Last Woman" were the fem bot from "The Tales of Hoffman."

Confronted with his mother's infidelity and his father's emotional absence, João arrives at a sunset where he refuses to return home.

A film like a monument: Luz nos Trópicos is a tribute to the rich greens of the Amazon and the forests of New England in winter, celebrating the indigenous peoples of continental America and flowing as a film as freely as a winding river.

About three generations of a family grappling with a life-changing experience during one day of a vacation in the historic town of Sintra, Portugal.

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

Lisbon, Portugal, 1927. The writer and journalist Fernando Pessoa accepts from his boss the commission to create an advertising slogan for the drink Coca-Louca; but conservative government authorities consider the new drink as revolutionary as it is diabolical.

Struggling against the crisis in Portugal, a mother doubles up jobs to pay the bills since her husband is unemployed. Their teenage daughter tries to keep living everyday life even if the money is running short, which makes everything uneasy. Escaping from their common reality, they slowly become strangers to one another, as the tension grows in silence and in guilt.

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

A delirious sci-fi riff on the Arabian Nights' 'Tale of the Hunchback', that submerges us in a technological dystopia reigned by Dalaya.com, a mega-corporation that forces its employees to 'relax' at company-run medieval reenactments.

An actress travels to Lisbon representing a film where she has a secondary role, regarding nobody else was available to go. In the Q&A in the Cinematheque she doesn't know how to answer the audience questions.

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.

In which Scheherazade doubts that she will still be able to tell stories to please the King, given that what she has to tell weighs three thousand tonnes. She therefore escapes from the palace and travels the Kingdom in search of pleasure and enchantment. Her father, the Grand-Vizier, arranges to meet her at the Ferris wheel, and Scheherazade resumes her narration: “Auspicious King, in old shanty towns of Lisbon there was a community of bewitched men who, in all rigour and passion, dedicated themselves to teaching birds to sing…”. And seeing the morning break, Scheherazade fell silent.

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.

Welcome to Lisbon: there are mermaids by the Tagus and birds flying over the old city; there are mad scientists and singing fish; lost tourist guides and lost tourists; fado and sad guitars. What a weird city you may think - but no. Lisbon is about being different, sarcastic, welcoming to foreigners even in an economic crisis. Different directors became fascinated by our strangeness. We became fascinated by these directors. The city is never the same in these four episodes, here in Lisbon.

A headlong dive into the deepest, silliest recesses of Abrantes’s unconscious.

José, a Bolivian retired general, is lying on his deathbed after a heart attack. Tormented by memories of his involvement in Operation Condor and invaded by deep remorse, he decides to tell his only son his biggest secrets in search of redemption.

An essay about disaffection in 7 segments inspired by Stendhal's seven stages of love, "De L'Amour" (1822). Most people are afraid of love because they are afraid of their deepest joy, delight and inner freedom.

Diana was born and raised in the neighborhood of Estrela Polar, lost his parents when he was a child and leads a band of criminals who negotiates for drugs, money laundering, weapons, paintings, jewelry and tobacco.

Passionate romance, brutal treachery, and selfless nobility are set against the background of Napoleon’s 1810 invasion of Portugal.

Lisbon, Portugal, 2010. Pilar, a pious woman devoted to social causes, maintains a peculiar relationship with her neighbor Aurora, a temperamental old woman obsessed with gambling who lives tormented by a mysterious past.

A woman recovering from a personal tragedy imprisons a man she met at a party, shutting him in a room of a building demolition.

Gabriel Abrantes and Alexander Melo deconstruct the 1st section of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew as a playful, vibrant ode to bacchanalia, classicism and homoeroticism.

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.

The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure and misfortune in the convulsed Europe of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Violante, a young and beautiful catholic nun, is facing a few marital issues with her husband Jesus Christ - who stalks her through the dark corners of a decaying convent and seeks to punish her for her (alleged) sins. In a dark stormy night they struggle to win each other to their personal points of view. She quotes the bible in terms of unconditional love - He does the same in terms of capital punishment. But are His manly insecurities based on solid grounds? After escaping His jealous rage, the nun lurks through the dark alleys and the bars like a vampire. Doomed to loneliness, all she wants is a Man. And who can this Man be?

Cinema is the true life.

Quitterie, a 40 year-old woman, relives the great love for her deceased 18 year-old Japanese partner, by successively meeting up with young strangers.

A transgender woman attempts to rehabilitate her younger, drug-addicted boyfriend while also dealing with her ne’er-do-well son, a solider who’s gone AWOL.

Guilherme and Sofia, brother and sister, grow up sharing experiences and slowly discovering their sexuality. The thing that Sofia doesn't know is how far Guilherme will go to keep her inside his own perverse, dark and perfect circle.

Diana is a young woman about to enter adulthood. She lives with her father, Gabriel, a game machine dealer, and Magdalene, the stepmother, alongside those working in a hair salon in a shopping center. One day, Diana discovers that Magdalene not only keeps a secret relationship with Michael, the security center and instructor in the gym of the neighborhood, as resumed his old habit of playing. Not to allow the stepmother to his father do the same as her mother had done to her, Diana decides to intervene, approaching the Magdalene lover.

A young French actress in Lisbon to shoot a movie is intrigued by a nun she sees kneeling in the chapel where she is filming.

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?

Werner Schroeter directed this dark and surreal tale of a man determined to save a lost lover from a grim fate at the hands of a violent mob. The city of Santa Maria is falling into chaos as an armed military faction is poised to take power in a coup d'etat. Ossorio used to call Santa Maria home, and he has returned in its darkest hour to find the woman he loves, hoping to rescue her from the violence that is lurks around the corner. As Ossorio searches for his love, he meets Victoria in a shabby hotel, who in turn introduces him to her father Barcala, who for the right price is willing to take Ossorio and another passenger away on his boat. While Ossorio is willing to pay Barcala what he wants, can he find the mysterious woman before the ship sets sail?

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.

There are two months to the end of High School Spanish classes in Lisbon and it's time to decide the destination for the end of year trip. That decision will cause a real "Civil War" between two irreconcilable groups: the "class nerd", who propose the typical cultural trip to Paris, and "freeloaders" who prefer to enjoy the week in Benidorm, the "New York's Costa Blanca ".

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.

Francisco, behave! I Know it's your birthday, you are thirty now, it's carnival, you've dressed as a cowboy for the school party and you are surrounded by kids you hate. But that's no reason to be so annoying... Francisco, repeat after me: "Up to your 30s you have the face God has given you. After that, you get the face you deserve".

This is the way you hold the racket to play a forehand. Just move your arm back, the left shoulder facing the ball, step forward with your left foot, hitting the ball.”

When Edward’s search for his biological family leads him and his girlfriend Ryley to a magnificent villa high in the mountains of Northern Portugal, he is full of excitement at meeting his long-lost mother and twin brother. Finally, he will discover who he is and where he comes from. But nothing is as it seems, and Edward will soon learn that he is linked to them by a monstrous secret.