Eduardo Geada

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

In 1974, not long after the death of Portuguese dictator Salazar, who had ruled Portugal from the early '30s to the late '60s, a group of disgruntled Army officers held a coup. They were even more disgruntled when they realized how the coup was being manipulated by leftist officers to instigate genuine elections and establish a constitution for the first time in Portuguese history. Though their intent was to form a radical socialist state, circumstances prevented this, and a genuine parliamentary democracy emerged. This film explores the circumstances of a right-wing businessman during those times. The man is an old-fashioned authoritarian, whose attentiveness to the needs of his mistress, wife and son is crude where it exists at all.

Dona Elvira promises to get a job from José through the typical Portuguese wedge. In parallel, they are bizarre aspects and eccentric figures of the city life, including the tragedy of the actress Maria Alves.

Once the boss started deducting a third of the workers' wages on the pretext that it was necessary to purchase new machines in order to compete, a group of workers went on strike, occupied the company, but were expelled from their workplace by the police. Out on the street, the workers think about the best way to make their comrades and the general population aware of the seriousness of their situation. They then decide, by mutual agreement, following the humorous tradition of cegadas and popular theater, to improvise a satirical performance in which they denounce some typical examples of capitalist exploitation. From the bandstand, which serves as their rehearsal stage, to the final procession, which unexpectedly takes on a different tone, the workers learn and teach us how scathing and uncompromising criticism of capitalist institutions can be transformed into a celebration of struggle, joy, and unity.

The movie centers around the rape ritual of a minor by four young men, with the intention of freeing one of them of his past relationship with the girl.

Film directors with hand-held cameras went to the streets of Lisbon from April 25 to May 1, 1974, registering interviews and political events of the Portuguese "Carnation Revolution", as that period would be later known.

The way in which the structuring of capitalist urban space reflects the contradictions and conflicts of the classes in struggle, and the demarcation of a Marxist analysis of urban reality, which the few off-screen statements only serve to confirm. One of the characteristics of the city in which we live is its differentiated distribution and use: the various areas do not have similar forms of occupation, nor the same urban facilities, nor populations with identical social and economic characteristics.