Vicente Wallenstein

A study about memory, an example of obsession or a prison in itself. Rodrigo chooses to submerge himself in a memory, regardless of what got him there or what might happen. Within this dream Rodrigo is happy. When confronted by the memory itself we are left with a question, is this a cry of victory, or the acclamation of defeat?

A football player and part-time fisherman starts to clean the beach he lives next to.

It is 1979. Four young ladies are hired to form a girl band. They can sing, they shine with their dancing, and they shock the country. They become a big hit. They are DOCE.

Maria da Luz waits for her husband who got lost somewhere in Angola during the war. With no news, she finds herself surrounded by families that, like her, desperately long for some kind of hope regarding their loved ones fighting abroad. She takes the matter in her hands and starts tape recording loving messages from each mother, wife and other family members. Carrying the tapes, she travels to Angola and personally delivers these messages to each and every soldier in a personal quest right in the middle of a country in war.

From a certain idea of Rousseauian rural purity, “Colmeal” is settled in the small homonymous village located in Riba-Côa, also known as ghost village, due to the effects of the rural exodus and the inland desertification. In an allegorical way, quite worked on the natural elements and the sound elements, the film tells the story of a young man who lives isolated and who obsessed by a woman who comes from the city to spend her summer vacation. Gradually, the young man tries to overcome the inability to deal with his emotions, seeking to discover himself, emotionally and sexually. Márcio Laranjeira and Sérgio Brás d’Almeida are debutants in Curtas Vila do Conde and propose a return to the themes of growing pains and transition to adulthood, with young people trying to find their place in the world and to define their personality, especially in context of social and loving relationships.

Idling afternoons, drugs, heartbreaks, psychedelic moods immersed in music. An adrenaline rush. Lisbon as the backdrop for a drifting youth.

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.

At an abandoned chapel a teenager gives herself to a boy, unsuspecting of what's lurking in the shadows.

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 portrait of a first relationship, previous to the external world, the one of the family. In a winter in Lisbon, father, mother, son and daughter trace the path of a day by themselves. A film that develops through characters who have for their antagonist life itself, with nothing (and everything) heroic about it.

Adaptation of the novel of the same name, by João Ricardo Pedro.