Silvia Siopa

A hotel by the northern shore of Portugal welcomes its guests over the weekend. A man is torn between being present for his wife and the space that his mother takes up between the two of them. A mother encourages her daughter’s marriage to enable her own love affair with her son-in-law. Another mother lives through her daughter, preventing her from making her own decisions. Three families at the end of their cycles of acceptance.

In a family-run hotel, by the Portuguese northern shore, lives a group of women from different generations of the same family, whose relationships with each other have grown poisoned by bitterness. They try to survive in the declining hotel, as the unexpected arrival of a granddaughter to this oppressive space stirs trouble, reviving latent hatred and piled-up resentments.

The lives of two women intersect.

There is a long night when Hugo, a civil servant, is sitting on the stairs of the Ministry where he works. He can’t face going home. The images of the mysterious 8 mm films he found in António’s house after he passed away keep coming back to his mind. Hugo remembers the day when Antonio, his superior at the Ministry, told him that he was going to die. Indirectly, Antonio seemed to want to tell him something about Hugo himself. Hugo’s desire to understand what had remained unsaid between the two of them, triggers other memories from the past. Hugo unexpectedly thinks back on the last time he saw the woman he loved, Adriana, and relives once more what he feels has been his unlived life.

A woman gets into a fight with her boyfriend, concerning her lack of humanism. Leaving him abruptly at the Santa Apolónia Station, she strikes a conversation with an interesting homeless man whom she decides to take home to just to show her boyfriend that she cares.