Pedro Marques

Burma, 1917. Edward, a civil servant for the British Empire, jilts his lovestruck fiancée Molly the day she arrives to be married. As he flees into an unexpected odyssey across Asia, the free-spirited Molly-amused by his moves-follows in pursuit, embarking on a globe-trotting cat-and-mouse chase.

Crista, Carloto and João are building an airy greenhouse for butterflies in the garden. The three of them share household routines, day after day… And they are not the only ones.

Scheherazade narrates three more tales, supposedly selected from the 470th, 484th and 497th nights of her ordeal: “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!

In which Scheherazade doubts that she will still be able to tell stories to please the King, given that what she has to tell weighs three thousand tonnes. She therefore escapes from the palace and travels the Kingdom in search of pleasure and enchantment. Her father, the Grand-Vizier, arranges to meet her at the Ferris wheel, and Scheherazade resumes her narration: “Auspicious King, in old shanty towns of Lisbon there was a community of bewitched men who, in all rigour and passion, dedicated themselves to teaching birds to sing…”. And seeing the morning break, Scheherazade fell silent.

A director struggles with a difficult sex scene between a young actor and actress who can't stand one another. Aided by her loyal assistant, she is hell-bent on getting the scene right without compromise.

Tiago, a tour guide with a broken heart leads Karen, a grieving and aging Brazilian woman, around a Lisbon of strange suicidal heroes. Tiago lives with his father, Raul, an old sailor haunted by historical defeats, and with his son, Manuel, a teenager fantasising of a solitary, but erotic, trip to the cosmos. All together, they take Karen through dreams, lost glories, and catastrophes to meet a fallen hero who disappeared many centuries ago on an island in the South Atlantic Ocean.

Nuno, a boy of nine, runs away from home on the night of the 24th of April 1974. He hides in a mysterious building that is being abandoned in great haste. People are running down the stairs, cars are leaving, finally Nuno and a dog are the only ones left. They become friends and fall asleep together. In the morning they wake up with screams from the street. Nuno thinks that it is his mother calling for him and runs to the window. The street its full of people, tanks and soldiers. It’s the 25th of April. And Nuno believes that it was his mother who made the revolution just to find him.

1970 something. As the end of an era of repression approaches, a bourgeois family still in its bubble of power spends its vacation in a country house. The teenage cousins spend their days in indolence, interrupted by fits of hysteria. It will only take the introduction of an outside element for violence to erupt.

Xavier returns to Lisbon after a military stint, determined to lead a meaningful life, only to find his world closing in on him.

During the war of in-dependency Evita moves from Lisbon to Mozambique to marry Luís. She slowly discovers how different and disturbing life is in a country of war and when her husband is send on a military mission she starts to fight loneliness. Over time she finds out more about her husband and Mozambique than she would have imagined in her peaceful European home. Racism, violence, injustice and fatalism make life unbearable...

Alexandra Lencastre plays a woman who believes she is President of the U.S.A.

After the Portuguese government demolishes his slum and relocates him to a housing project on the outskirts of Lisbon, 75-year-old Cape Verde immigrant Ventura wanders between his new and old homes, reconnecting with people from his past.

From Sunday to Sunday, the Arcozelo football field is battered by the North wind. The lawn has to be swept and lots of clothes washed. - The boys are coming! - The two equipment managers, São and Cunha, know the name of the little players. Everyone is taken care of and the socks drying on the goals are also to be lent.

After fourteen years away from her homeland, Salomé is forced to return to Cape Verde to see her dying brother. During her stopover at Lisbon airport, Águeda, a cleaning lady, recognizes Salomé as "Mila", her childhood friend. Águeda invites Salomé to leave the airport and spend the stopover at her home, with the women of her family. The neighborhood transports her on a spiritual journey, whose destination reveals a painful bond with her homeland.

Pele is a film about a young mulatto woman that in spite of being rich, beautiful and intelligent, feels discriminated because of the colour of her skin. The entire plot is in the early 70's, when Portugal had a dictatorial government, ultramarine territories and lots of racism in its society… Issues like racism, female condition and the spoilt lives of the high-society are the main themes of this movie

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.

Men and plants have always traveled together in a reciprocal relationship that - for better or for worse - has drastically transformed the world. The mythical cacao tree, native to the Amazon Basin, has spread throughout the world along the narrow equatorial belt. Planted on a large scale using forced labor, the history of cacao has always been linked to the dark side of industrial production and the greed of the mass markets. The director Margarida Cardoso ("The Murmuring Coast", "Yvone Kane", "Kuxa Kanema, the birth of Cinema", "Christmas 71") follows the path of his previous films, exploring and revealing the relations between the brutality of colonial history and its effects in the present.

1907. Afonso, a doctor, arrives at Principe Island to cure servants from a cocoa plantation “infected” with Banzo, nostalgia of the slaves, who are dying from starvation and suicide. The group is confined to the forest, where Afonso decides to heal them by trying to understand what is affecting their soul. Will he manage to save them?

Christmas Night. A man, a serial killer gets out in order to search another victim. The thoughts could be our own but the end is unpredictable.

Patrick, 20-years-old, lives in Paris with his older boyfriend. He runs a teenage pornography website, which results in a prison sentence following a raid at a party. Mário, 8-years-old, was kidnapped 12 years ago in Portugal. Patrick and Mário are the same person with two conflicting identities: a life in Paris filled with parties, drugs, and promiscuity and a new rural life in Portugal, where he feels obliged to reconnect with a broken family.

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.