José Manuel Mendes

Tiago, a tour guide with a broken heart leads Karen, a grieving and aging Brazilian woman, around a Lisbon of strange suicidal heroes. Tiago lives with his father, Raul, an old sailor haunted by historical defeats, and with his son, Manuel, a teenager fantasising of a solitary, but erotic, trip to the cosmos. All together, they take Karen through dreams, lost glories, and catastrophes to meet a fallen hero who disappeared many centuries ago on an island in the South Atlantic Ocean.

Marilou and Philippe decide to show their grandchildren their new holiday home in Portugal. But once there, they discover to their horror that the house is still under construction. This is just the beginning of the problems for the grandparents, because soon they will lose their children. They have only two days left to find them, before their parents join them.

Beatriz married Henrique on the day of her 21st birthday. Henrique, a naval officer, would spend long periods at sea. Ashore, Beatriz, who learned everything from the verticality of plants, took great care of the roots of their six children. The oldest son, Jacinto (Hyacinth), my father, dreamed he could be a bird. One day, suddenly, Beatriz died. My mom didn’t die suddenly, but she too died when I was 17 years-old. On that day, me and my father met in the loss of our mothers and our relationship was no longer just that of father and daughter.

A nun is called upon to adopt her 15-year-old nephew, and as a consequence religious, familial and sensual love become entangled.

At the end of the nineteenth century, two inexperienced Portuguese colonizers, with a vague intention of civilizing the colonies, disembark in a remote part of the Congo River in order to coordinate a trading post. As time goes by, they become increasingly demoralized by their inability to profit from the ivory trade. A mutual feeling of distrust and misunderstadings with the locals isolate them at the heart of the tropical jungle. Faced with each other, they begin a journey towards the abyss.

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.

A photographer, Isaac is asked by hotel owners to take portraits of their recently deceased daughter Angélica. When he looks at her through the lens of his camera, she appears to come back to life just for him. He instantly falls in love with her. From that moment, he will be haunted by Angélica day and night.

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.

Elliot Tittensor (TV's Shameless) stars as Daz in headlining film PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT, a gripping British film debut that sees him woo a young lad in an underpass, only to be threatened with a break-up the following morning. Passive and submissive roles are tackled and tugged in gay graffiti tale VANDALS and Icelandic grapple-fest WRESTLING, while POSTMORTEM, MY NAME IS LOVE, and Iris Prize-winner STEAM look at promising encounters that turn awry. Rounding out the collection are HEIKO, an alternative ode to foot fetishes, BREATH where 12-year-old Erik swims out to sea to make a daring move on his best friend's father, and the crème de la crème from this collection TREVOR, which won multiple prestigious awards from Sundance, Berlinale, and even The Academy Awards (Oscar) for Best Short Film.

A 70-year-old man is in a relationship with a young man named Heiko. It is a fetishist relationship taken to extreme exoticism.

Manoel de Oliveira directs José Régio's historical epic of religious and political power struggles. King Sebastião plans to make Portugal the world's Fifth Empire.

Having lost her place among the social elite, a widow remarries and starts a family.

A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the convent. These rather ironic paradoxes turn this fairytale into a philosophical fable.

Based on the events which took place the night of April 24th, 1999 in Portugal. This is the story of the Coup d'État which put an end to the Dictatorship and reinstated the Democracy.

Cristina is twenty years old. Her father was declared missing in action during the war in Angola many years before. One day in church the girl meets a man about fifty years old who tries various times, unsuccessfully, to make the sign of the cross. The man is called Cristovão. A few days later the two meet again. The man offers to help her look for her father. A relationship based on memories and confessions is formed between them. But soon they each return to their own solitude.

Macau 1897. Life is easy for Portuguese settlers. Young reveler Francisco Frontaria is deemed as irresponsible for all his partying and boozing. Shunned and exiled for crossing a line by insulting the daughter of a prominent family, he finds himself penniless and vagrant.

This Portuguese movie directed by João Botelho, is part of The Four Elements series. This is the second episode, The Air.

This odd film is a major representative of an even odder film genre: direct-to-celluloid opera. It was commissioned by the Portuguese master of style, director Manoel de Oliveira from composer João Paes. Musically, it ranges from 19th-century romanticism to popular, modernist and even "post-modernist" styles. In the initially tame story, a host-narrator tells the story of a wedding between the two lovebirds: Viscount d'Aveleda and the beautiful Marguerite. However, what happens in the bridal chamber is incredibly bizarre. The events after that are even stranger (the film out-does even Luis Buñuel in that department), and the wedding guests and family indulge in cannibalism, among other perversions.

It is the end of summer and Isabel is a relationship with Diogo. She don't quite know what she wants from her life going forward as her father gets sick.