Carlos Saboga

Passionate romance, brutal treachery, and selfless nobility are set against the background of Napoleon’s 1810 invasion of Portugal.

In ancient Mauretania, the young Roman Lucius Apuleius and his friend Aristomene run into a series of misadventures.

The story of the adventures, in the twilight of the eighteenth century, of a singular couple formed by a little orphan with mysterious origins and his young Italian nurse of a similarly uncertain birth. They lead us in their wake, from Rome to Paris, from Lisbon to London, from Parma to Venice. Always followed in the shadows, for obscure reasons, by a suspicious-looking Calabrian and a troubling cardinal, they make us explore the dark intrigues of the Vatican, the pangs of a fatal passion, a gruesome duel, banter at the court of Versailles and the convulsions of the French Revolution.

A newspaper reporter comes across a man and woman arguing on the beach, and after obligingly driving the woman around when she seeks him out, he takes her back to discover that the man has been murdered. The woman takes off, but the reporter, after many twists and turns, runs into her on a train. They start a relationship, but he had better pay closer attention to how he got to know her in the first place.

A loner, narcissistic and suicidal teenager attracts most of the people he meets like a fatal aura, a black light. He falls deeply in love with Teresa but does she exist or is she a mere figment, an image, a reflection? Teresa is an apparition. A pretext for an amoral violent uprising, for doomed love.

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.

Her mother has just died. Her father is not what she had thought. Caught between an uncertain past, which she knows only through the photographs her mother has left behind, and the prospect of a marriage that she does not really want, Elisa sets out to discover the truth. But will she recognize it when she finds it?

Portugal, 1917. The country is experiencing a great political and social agitation and it is said that in Fatima the virgin appeared to three little shepherds. Salomé, a young lady from the province, is one of the many girls who cheers Lisbon brothels, but she is such a special girl that a rich man invites her to live in his house and presents her to the high society of Lisbon. But her past will not stop chasing her and Salomé, who thought that this would be the beginning of a new life, will eventually lose everything by becoming an involuntary character of this miracle that agitated the country...

Mitó lives in a small village and is the son of the local Comunist Party leader, she is 18 years-old and is about to graduate from the high-school she must attend at Beja - the nearest town. News that she killed her German boyfriend, at 4 a.m. on a desert road, do not excite much the editor of a Lisbon newspaper. He sends in a tyro reporter, Joaquim Peixoto, just in case. The young man, already considered hopless in his profession, will uncover more than a sex scandal to be used for political purposes. Written by Artemis-9

It’s 1942, and Portugal languishes under dictatorship and WWII rages just beyond its borders. Secrets, half-truths, and mistrust prevail in the state security office of chief inspector Varga, who makes professional privilege a cover for his unprofessional interest in a boldly carnal refugee and her alleged brother. Director/writer Saboga (screenwriter for Raúl Ruiz’s MYSTERIES OF LISBON) saturates the dark world of this predatory tale with steamy eroticism and paranoia, starting with the incestuous desires of his bi-curious adolescent daughter and including the family maid.

In 1918, Maria Adelaide Coelho da Cunha, heiress and owner of the Diário de Notícias, leaves the social, cultural and family luxury in which she lives to escape with a petty chauffeur, 26 years younger.

Accused of adultery, Ana Augusta Plácido and Camilo Castelo Branco were imprisoned for more than a year in the Porto Prison, she in June 1860, he in October of the same year, after an adventurous escape from justice through the lands of the North.

Abel, 47 years old, two wars - in the colonies and France, emigration - several scars from many battles lost, returns in a jump to Portugal, to his lost village in the northern interior, near the border, from where one day he'd be gone, also from a jump. A letter, from his brother Peter, warned him that everything changed. Even Teresa. Abel catches sight of his childhood in the village hills, the old tribe. From a distance everything seams to be in the same placesa, the old dog is all that remains of the past. In the village the Act of Passion will be performed and Teresa is one of the participants. Abel takes the old gestures and prepares his plan: eliminate one by one Teresa's suitors, to consummate during the act of the Passion, her death ...

Ofelia is the daughter of photographer Miguel and of deceased circus artist Lea. When her father is hospitalised with a nervous breakdown, she decides to find out the reason and in doing so discovers the truth about the relationship between her parents and the true fate of her mother.

At the end of the nineteenth century, an army force led by Major Mouzinho de Albuquerque, a cavalry officer, imprisoned in Mozambique the tribal chief Gungunhana, who had rebelled against Portuguese government and sovereignty. Mouzinho instantly becomes a national hero but his raising popularity worries the State.

A woman takes her young son, leaves her husband and moves in with her lover. The boy, desperate to get his parents back together, becomes convinced that if only he can get his father's stolen motorcycle back everything will be fine again, so he sets out to get enough money to buy his father a new one.

Two sons dream of the return of their father who left fifteen years earlier, and all this time without any sign of life...

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. (A longer television version of the film of the same name, released in 2010.)

The miniseries charts Napoleon Bonaparte’s career from his return after the Egyptian campaign to his downfall and exile on Elba, portraying his political maneuvering, military ambition, and complex relationships with key figures such as Talleyrand, Fouché, Murat, Tsar Alexander, Joséphine de Beauharnais, and Countess Marie Walewska.