Catarina Alves Costa

Between 1958 and 1961, Margot Dias participated in four ethnographic missions to the northern end of Mozambique. She shot and taped hundreds of minutes—unique visual and sound recordings of Makonde culture. One seeks to portray the woman behind the records from those trips, from her youth in Germany in the 1920s, to meeting and marrying Portuguese ethnologist Jorge Dias, to the missions they made together to the then Portuguese colony. As she meets with Makonde people today and hands them back these images, the director seeks the gaze of the other director, whom she knew at the end of her life.

A documentary about Margot Dias (Germany, 1908 - Portugal, 2001), an ethnologist who shot between 1958-61 among the Makonde tribe, at Mueda, Mozambique. The film is an inner journey that will gradually unravel the circumstances in which these original filming were made, during the period of Portuguese domination of Mozambique, based on Margot Dias' unpublished diary and other texts and sounds, from archives related to the colonial period. But it's also these materials' confrontation with the people we are meeting on the trip to Mozambique, to whom we want to return part of its history.

“Um Ramadão em Lisboa” e um filme colectivo construído a 12 mãos que revela uma Lisboa plural e heterogénea através de uma série de personagens que, durante o mês de Ramadão, vivem diferentes experiências. Um filme que visita os seus quotidianos, num contexto geográfico e social onde esta não é uma prática comum nem maioritária. Seguindo um processo criativo partilhado, este documentário procura colocar em pano de fundo uma Lisboa próxima e reconhecível, dissipando a alteridade e o exotismo, num movimento de aproximação humana do cinema.

A film about rural houses in the interior of the Algarve, showing the relationship between the present and memories evoked in the intimacy of the home. Working architecture from the "social imaginary", focusing on how homes were and are lived.

'One day I realized it no longer made sense to make things to hang on walls'... Lourdes Castro became known as the artist 'who took care of shadows'. Throughout her international career as an artist, Lourdes developed the concept of shadow, giving it different forms and finally reducing it to the minimum and dematerializing it. She has lived in Munich, Berlin and Paris, but 40 years ago she decided to return to Madeira, her birth place, where she has lived ever since 'in the shadows'. 'What is Lourdes 'taking care of' nowadays?

A portrait of António Campos, an extraordinary cineaste that was called an amateur, one of the most unique Portuguese directors due to the way he filmed the country on the 1960 and 1970’s. Considered as a director out of the mainstream, a loner, instinctive, Campos stands for the passion of filming.

A documentary about Álvaro Siza Vieira in Cape Verde and his project to restore the old town of Ribeira Grande, the first city to be built by the Portuguese in Cape Verde on the island of Santiago in 1462.

A documentary about Álvaro Siza Vieira in Cape Verde and his project to restore the old town of Ribeira Grande, the first city to be built by the Portuguese in Cape Verde on the island of Santiago in 1462.

Houses to sell…houses to live in…houses to fill and die in… Mr. António Carlos works in a real estates agency, he is pressurized daily by his superiors to close contracts and bring profit to the company. Joana, a single mother, and her baby, Joaquim, are moving house hoping for a different life. Mr. Pinto has an old-fashioned removal company and his days are spent waiting for the phone to ring, but there isn’t much work and when finally work shows up it always hides a surprise. Three stories set in Oporto, Portugal, about people, houses, and restless lonely urban lives.

Lisboa acolhia nos anos 90 a segunda maior comunidade de hindus da Europa. A família Carsane, originária de Diu, com passagem por Moçambique, vive desde há alguns anos em Lisboa. O filme acompanha o seu quotidiano mostrando contrastes e diferenças dentro de uma comunidade aparentemente coesa.

In Aparecida, 50 Km from o’Porto, the atmosphere surrounding this years preparation of the yearly festivities is tense: the new priest aims to discouraje the "Promise payers" from doing it having themselves carried in open coffins through the village untill th chappel of the Appeared Lady. Superstition against Theological Argument, fidelity to the vows or reinterpretation… The conflict becomes unavoidable. It’s the local identity and its inhabitants identity that’s in stake. If this type of processions were common in the last century on the north of the Iberian Peninsula, this one, will probably be the last in Portugal. At the village of Senhora Aparecida the festivities of August are set. The main wooden bier that will carry the Saint may be 15 metres high. It is now being assembled and decorated. Those who escaped death now celebrate life. The Lady redistributes the power she's been given.

Numa pequena aldeia isolada na Serra D'Arga, no Norte de Portugal, espera-se ansiosamente a chegada dos emigrantes que regressam de férias. Durante dois meses, dá-se então este encontro com a família, os amigos, ou o Santo padroeiro. Apesar do contraste cultural entre os que ficam e os que partem, a identidade dos emigrantes constrói-se com base nesta ligação ao rural, à terra...

11th century. Descended from the aristocracy, Alexis flees a world dominated by money and strength. The young man, in love with justice and freedom, sets off on the roads to discover the world, abandoning his wife and family.

At the time Portugal presented a strange spectacle to the rest of Europe. D. Afonso VI, son of the fortunate D. João de Bragança, was in possession of the throne and was an insane imbecile. His wife, daughter of the Duke of Nemours and cousin of Louis XIV, dared hatch a plot to oust her husband from the throne. The king's stupidity justified the queen's bravado. Despite being master of unusual strength and having slept with his wife for a long time, she accused him of being impotent. Marie Françoise had acquired through artfulness what Afonso had lost in anger in the kingdom. She had him imprisoned ( November 1667 ) and quickly obtained a papal bull from Rome to confirm her virginity and bless her marriage to her brother-in-law Pedro. Portugal's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1990.

The young girl, Antónia Margarida Castelo Branco, is handed over by her mother to Brás Telles de Meneses because of the obscure interests between rural aristocratic families in the North. Brás is a ruined man, a bohemian with a reputation for violence and erratic behaviour. Antonia’s fortune is the first sacrifice made by the young wife. Fascinated by the man who humiliates and ill-treats her, she follows him in a pilgrimage to increasingly barren lands, to increasingly less hospitable houses.