Acácio de Almeida

Fed up with the sea, Paul, a Swiss mechanic working in the noisy bowels of a merchant ship, lands in Lisbon.

Centered on an elderly matriarch and her family in the Trás-os-Montes region of Portugal. An exploration of the cycle of life and death, using the main character, Ana, as an emblem of a life lived in harmony with nature and tradition.

A debauched nobleman offers himself to a beautiful woman, but she is repelled by his advances. He dons a mask and tries again, and this time is more successful. But the mask cannot conceal the evil in his soul.

An American ballerina arrives in Hungary to enroll in a ballet school and it soon becomes apparent that things are not what they seem.

In 2017, in Portugal, devastating wildfires destroyed forests and killed children and adults; some died in their villages, others were trapped on a road. Communication failed, and the villages had no shelters. The film’s action does not take place in 2017, but at a later time. It follows a small group of people who lost their dearest ones and are now in the process of learning how to live after everything they have lost.

When the child Manuel wanders into a garden that is off-limits to him, he meets an unidentified fisherman, and another boy -- the boy is actually himself several years down the road. Manuel experiences three different versions of his encounters in the garden, revealing that fate can have several twists and turns in one's life, depending on decisions that are made early on.

A publisher seeks information on a writer who died long ago.

In Portugal, in the 60s, the corpse of a man appears on Dog's Beach. The corpse is identified as the major Dantas, a man wanted by authorities after his escape from a military prison where he was awaiting trial for insurrection.

Laura Rossellini, a widow from Rome, vacations on the Algarve coast one hot summer. One day while sunbathing, she finds a wounded man named Robert drifting in the surf on a rubber raft. She takes him home, and, after he is revived, learns his story. As they talk, their mutual attraction grows, until a group of armed men suddenly arrive looking for Robert.

A widowed theater actor relives his memory of a young love.

An impossible love. Two young people who love each other. Vera and João can’t find in this life the space, time, or identity to resolve their love story.

Alentejo, Portugal, 1950. In a desolate region, where the wind seems to speak, where misery and hunger reign over poorest, a desperate man takes his revenge on those who caused his ruin during the darkest night, unable to get honestly the bread needed to feed his family in the daylight.

VIEIRARPAD begun with the correspondence between the couple Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szènes, between 1932-1961. The letters and the intimacy of their words are pretext for the exploration of an equally intimate visual journey

Lives is the story of a middle-aged couple that dwells the night, the heroin and small tricks.

A man died under mysterious circumstances. An insurance company expert has to visit the four women in his life - his mother, his widow, his daughter and his mistress - to find out the causes of death. With each account, the deceased will appear in a new light, to the point where it is doubtful that it is the same man.

Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures.

Alex is a famous singer who lives in a big mansion. One quiet night, a hooded stranger comes into his home, shoots the butler and then takes the mask out. Surprisingly, it's a woman. At the beginning she just want to have dinner with him.

An aristocratic Sicilian family living in the 1950s. Count Villafratti has sex one night with his nymphomaniac daughter because he thinks she is his wife.

Mércedès, an actress from Paris attempts to break off a difficult relationship with the jealous and possessive stalker Johnny. She meets newspaper writer Pierre and goes with him for an afternoon fling. Before the sweat even dries, she finds herself hopelessly in love with him. But soon after their affair begins, he is called off on a business trip leaving the suddenly distraught Mércedès alone. Though preparing for a new play, she is unable to concentrate and barely able to function. Mércedès quits the production, locks herself in Pierre's apartment and quietly begins falling apart, collapsing into a bleak, reclusive madness until his return.

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.

David has a wife and young daughter. In a few days he will be moving abroad with his family. The death of his grandfather obliges him to return to the village of his birth and a family he hasn’t seen in years. There he meets his cousin's wife Ana, who intrigues him, and this trip, which should have ended with the funeral, turns into a long stay.

Three homeless teenage rejects struggle to survive together. Of them, Andreia is pregnant, while Pedro and Ricardo hustle, steal and are exploited by a pornographer.

A bewitching combinatory adaptation of the Bluebeard tale and a 15th century Portuguese fable of a damsel who disguises herself as a knight errant.

Yerma is desperate to have children, so when a psychic advises her to look outside her marriage to conceive, what can she say but yes?

This three part French TV serial for children (alternate versions exist as a feature, Manoel’s Destinies, and a 4 part Portuguese TV serial, Adventure in Madeira) is the favourite of many devotees of Raúl Ruiz. This is because it ties the enchantment and mystery of Lewis Carroll, Carlo Collodi and the Brothers Grimm to the filmmaker’s experiments with narrative strategies and what he calls the pentaludic model of storytelling (where characters are thrown dice-like into combinations and situations governed by the play of Chance and Destiny).