Marta Pessoa

Carta a Uma Jovem Escritora is a reflection on memory and forgetting, presented through five striking portraits of five Portuguese women writers: Olga Gonçalves, Graça Pina de Morais, Maria Cecília Correia, Alice Sampaio, and Maria Amélia Neto.

Documentary about the life of the lyric singer Natália de Andrade.

Between 1947 and 1949, the writer Maria Lamas traveled the country to publicize the reality in which Portuguese women lived. The result of this tour was the book "As Mulheres do Meu País". More than 70 years later, director Marta Pessoa and writer Susana Moreira Marques seek to understand what this book is and what it can tell us today.

Emilia is a writer, living in Lisbon in the year 1959. She is the “Damsel Warrior”, a fictional woman composed from the literary universes of Maria Judite de Carvalho and Irene Lisboa, writers of the city and the characters that inhabit it.

Following international recognition of Fado, Portugal recently submitted to UNESCO the polyphonic songs of the Alentejo, known as Cante Alentejano, or just Cante, as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This film will be a journey into the hot Alentejo countryside (Southern region of Portugal) discovering Cante music and the life of its performers. Not many people outside Portugal know about these a capella polyphonic choirs, typically formed by 20 to 30 male agricultural workers or miners, that seem to express the deep voice of the Earth.

A hundred letters written by Portuguese women during the Salazar dictatorship were found by chance in a second-hand bookshop. By confronting today the women who wrote these letters with the ghosts of the past, and revealing important archive material, Letters to a Dictatorship takes us on an in-depth journey through the obscurantism that dominated Portugal for more than 50 years.

Documentary about the old people living in the highest floors of old buildings with no lifts, in Lisbon.

"The Lurking Fear" interviews Portuguese citizens whose lives where hit by the torture of its fascist political police.

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.

The paths of pain are populated by men and women of all ages, suffering from lack of affection, lack of money, mental problems, alcoholism and drug addiction, or they are simply people who have come to Portugal in search of a life that is a little better. On the other side of this path there is a veritable anthill of volunteers, social welfare workers and different technical assistants who construct and maintain support structures, some of them thinking of better days, and others institutionalising this help without believing that the phenomenon can be cured.

50 years after its beginning, it's still a delicate and hermetic subject today, based on an exclusively male speech, as if veterans were war's only owners and victims. When a country is at war though, is there anybody left out? Warriors is a generation's war movie, told by those who were left behind to wait, those who chose to be there and those who ran to rescue the soldiers from the battle's front lines. A female insight on war.

In early 1985, the writer Nuno Bragança hands his friend Carlos Antunes a 13 question’s questionnaire; 13 sheets of graph paper, of which he offered the recto-verso of each for his friend to answer. The questions were about Carlos Antunes’ personal and political career, with a special interest in his involvement in the Revolutionary Brigades and the armed struggle against the dictatorship that led to his arrest in 1978. The untimely death of the writer, in the same year, left the questionnaire unanswered and some uncertainty as to its purpose. After almost 30 years, the director asks Carlos Antunes to answer the 13 questions and to reconstruct the achievements, illusions and sorrows of the Revolutionary Brigades in Portugal, in the years surrounding the Carnations’ Revolution in 1974.

In greater Lisbon area, the name Cova da Moura has never been synonymous with well-being, education or prosperity. on the contrary, it has always been associated with the idea of violence, insecurity, danger or, at best, with lack of education and sheer poverty. Cova da Moura Island follows this neighbourhood's daily life, finding the cape verdean reflections in it and searching for the ways in which social exclusion is fought or perpetuated in the lives of its residents.

A film that scrutinizes the idea of “soft racism” and how it comes to drink from the exalted Portuguese colonialism. The titular Rosinha is a Guinean native who became the symbol of the first Portuguese colonial exhibition presented by the Estado Novo in 1934. A trip to the past to better understand the present.

What would you take with you if you had to leave home without knowing if you would come back? Between 1974 and 1976, nearly 300 thousand Portuguese had to leave Angola. More than 100 thousand were born there. This is the story of the incredible escapes from Angola by land, sea and air. And of everything that they didn't want to leave behind.

In Lisbon 1950, John, 13, decides to invade the neighborhood of prostitutes, nobility and sailors, starting a new stage in his life. Today this neighborhood is reflected in a scattered public debate centered on its night life.

Documentary about the work and life of António Ole, one of the most notable contemporary artists from Angola.

100,000 Portuguese young men left for war in the countrie's former colonies. In the same period, 100,000 fled the country so as to not be part of that war. What was the former's role in shaping Portugal?

One day, a woman appeared at the Vigilatório de Enfermidades Comuns e Ordinárias (Common and Ordinary Illnesses Clinic) complaining of itching. A strange mold had grown on her back...

A documentary that records the lives of a group of former (and some still active) Portuguese transvestites. They are: Zizi Mayer, Fanny Star, Guida Scarllaty, Deborah Krystal and Wanda Morelli. They are João Callati, Fernando Paulo, Carlos Ferreira, Fernando Santos and Fernando Soares. All these artists deserve to have their lives told because they are bigger than anything they give on stage. They are important symbols of Portuguese cultural memory and their lives and careers illustrate different moments and mentalities in our country. They are lives that have endured hardships and overcome them in forbidding times and where persecution and punishment reigned supreme. No documentary has ever been made about their lives and it is urgent that these stories are not lost. They also tell the story of our political and cultural country.

A Escolinha do Golias was a Brazilian television program presented and produced by SBT between 1990 and 1997. Returned to be displayed by SBT in 2007, in the schedule of the El Chavo.