João Vladimiro

Melgaço, Parada do Monte. The memory of a chance encounter on the border between the real and the imagined, the affection and superstition, has been passed down from generation to generation.

“Campo de Marte” (The Field of Mars) was in the ancient times Rome’s training arena for war. At the outskirts of Lisbon, “Campo” hosts today Europe’s largest military base. In this place military troops train fictional missions, astronomy aficionados observe the stars and a boy plays the piano for the wild deers lurking in the dark.

A film about a show and the issues the players face during their collective artistic work. Will we ever be able to leave our cocoons towards a collective movement? How strongly do we believe in those who should lead us? How strongly do they believe in us? We try… We fall… We rise… We try once again… Will we ever make it?

4 hectares of ground are the gardens that surround the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. Throughout one year João Vladimiro’s camera follows the work of landscape architect Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles, commissioned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. “I know that the trees don’t have eyes, that the water doesn’t have a mouth, and that stones don’t have ears. Still, we communicate. In this particular garden, long mute talks take place, like the two elders that, through their sheer presence, talk to each other about calmness, comfort and sadness.”, says director Vladimiro, whose patient camera eye pays attention to the smallest events.

Anteu is born in a village where he’s the only child around. His mother ends up dying after a while and the father soon follows suit. One by one the people from the village start to disappear and Anteu, now a 17 years old boy carries on with his solitary life. One night, a dream awakes him: who would bury him?

If the scorpion could see and the viper could hear, there would be no escape". The viper is deaf and the scorpion can't see, so it is and so shall be, the same way the countryside is peaceful and the city bustling and the human being impossible to satisfy. Lacrau demands the return "to the curve where man got lost" in a journey from the city towards nature. The escape from chaos and emotional void we call progress; matter without spirit, without will. The search for the most ancient sensations and relationships of mankind. The amazement, the fear of the unknown, the loss of basic comforts, loneliness, the meeting with the other, the other animal, the other vegetable. A dive looking for a connection with the world. Where beginning and end are the same, but I am not.

Uncle Zé came from the highlands to Lisbon at an early age, and brought a particular bond with the earth and with men. In the rubble produced by the construction of the underground, he has built a realm where he is King, obeying only to the space that sets him free.

In an ominous Lisbon courtyard where the last executioner of the kingdom once lived, an accident is waiting to happen. After a patient game of who's observing who, four characters will collide with dire consequences. Inspired by the novel The Damned Yard by Nobel Prize-winning Bosnian writer Ivo Andrić, this is a masterclass in slow cinema, a pure 16mm cinematic pleasure by André Gil Mata.