Regina Guimarães

If I Were a Thief... I'd Steal

1920s. Vitalino, a small farmer from São Vicente sees his father die of the epidemic which decimated the country. Some years later, of all the brothers, Vitalino is the strongest and takes his father’s place in the house. But the village is too small for his aspirations and he decides to head to Brazil, leaving his sisters in charge of the household. In parallel with Vitalino’s story, If I Were a Thief… I’d Steal portrays the world of Paulo Rocha rummaging through his films and ghosts over the years.

Percebes

With the sea and urban Algarve as the backdrop, we follow a complete life cycle of a special shellfish called percebes, the goose barnacle.

Mau Dia

From Jacques Prévert's poem “Petit déjeuner du matin”, Mau Dia experiences a dilation of the time in which the banality hides the lived drama. All elements are decomposed and then rebuilt - painted walls, orchestrated rain, spoiled actions, depicted or sung…

Dentro

Porto 2001 project, made in the prison of Paços de Ferreira. Nuno Cardoso, the play director, develops this work with the prisoners during the time period of one year. Documentation of the process: conversations with the prisoners in the context of the process of artistic creation and the theater project. Interviews and testimonials with various people who cross their experiences, their view of life and their life behind bars, with the development of the play.

Life Lesson

To attain knowledge, man and woman had to be willing to give up their innocence," says Boris Lehman. Life Lesson is a poetic and philosophic reflection on the theme of paradise lost. Some fifty persons illustrate the planet's convulsions and the world's vacillations. Trying to communicate, to commune with the invisible, they cry out, sing out, give out messages, each in their own way, in their own state of solitude. These are like multiple echoes that resemble waves in the water or stars in the sky. " Behind these images and sounds that have been stifled by today's society, Lehman hunts for noises, cries, songs, messages that go astray. He says that if we look at the invisible we may hear the words. He invites us to look beyond the appearances of social life and to vibrate in tune with life's polyphony that is all around us."

Má Sina

In an empty theatre, a woman is watching an American film - "Ma's Sin" - which tells the weird revenge story of a middle-aged wife, driven mad by jealousy and a deep feer of dying. During the screening, the viewer's fantasies embodied in male characters harass her. Thus she will live the double adventure of the projected motion picture and of her own mental film. But as the lights turn on, she leaves the theatre, apparently unaffected.

Vanity

Vanitas is the new feature film by veteran Portuguese director Paulo Rocha. With a script by Regina Guimarães, the film brings together actresses Isabel Ruth and Joana Bárcia – no strangers to this director's world – in a story about a depressed fashion designer who falls in love with the daughter of one her tailors.

The Life of Mirrors

The Life of Mirrors is one of the sections of the exhibition Luis Miguel Cintra - Small Theatre of the World. A commission by Serralves Foundation to Regina Guimarães and Saguenail, and constructed after an unpublished interview with Luis Miguel Cintra, this film is the result of a long and painstaking exercise of selecting and editing excerpts from films by Manoel de Oliveira in which Cintra participates as an actor. In this way, The Life of Mirrors is a reflective, retrospective essay film, which opens the Carte Blanche, thus establishing a gateway to Luis Miguel Cintra's cinematographic and cinephile career.