Tomás Baltazar

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

Luis Miguel Cintra, renowned actor, stage director and director of the Portuguese theatre company Teatro da Cornucópia, staged the play Illusion in early 2014. This play was based upon texts by Federico García Lorca. However, the 119th company's show was no ordinary show, for in the cast there were 59 non-actors, amateurs and theatre students.

Resurrected through UK-led archival restoration NOVA 78' shows never-before-seen footage of the legendary Nova Convention where William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Zappa, Ginsberg and more collided in an explosion of ideas, art and rebellion.

The sound was deafening. The noise of the machines, the steps, the daily hustle of the more than a thousand workers, entering and leaving the shifts. There were 12-hour days, people without holidays, a stolen youth so that the cloth would continue to leave the factory. The revolution came and everything changed. Strikes, picket strikes, worker’s rights. Then the globalisation came. The factory went down to close. We went back to it, with the former workers, the old and the young. The machines continue to work in the empty spaces, the ghosts wander illuminated by traces of light until the walls begin to fall.

Bound by a silent pact, five students make a secret trip to the country for what seems to be an initiation ceremony. In threatening landscapes and abandoned ruins, they submit to the strange rituals of their leader, the Dux.

A teenage girl's dream of becoming famous turns into a dangerous obsession.

In the mid-20th century, a troubled relationship between Germana, a young writer, and Quina, her aunt who lives in the northern Portuguese countryside. Feelings of jealousy, admiration and the complex magnetism between these two strong women arise.

Free adaptation of Sophocles classic tragedy “King Oedipus” crossed with Jack Kerouac's classic “On the Road”. The starting point is the loss of identity of a generation of Portuguese emigrants. Tebas tells the story of a young man who, looking for his origins, departs from Paris to Portugal with a beatnik truck driver. The film is a voyage into the strange depths of Portugal in the form of surreal road-movie.

Two childhood friends grew up and face strange feelings now. One of them tries to explore that feelings by words and their relationship becomes uncomfortable. When the words stay in silence they discover what they are looking for.

Through the letters received from friends and family who remained in Japan, the filmmaker recalls the past and reflects on moving to Portugal and leaving Tokyo.

Redheads. Fire crotches… This film collects samples of their testimonials and their body hair and skin. About being different genetically, about gay gingers, doubly in a minority, from Ireland to Israel to Brazil. A film made especially for ginger lovers.

A mysterious shadow unveiling a female figure walking naked towards us in the desert. In another sequence, the same woman speaks on the phone, talking about the end of the world. In a third moment, a couple prepares breakfast in their apartment, with the same woman from the previous sequences embracing a baby. What will these three narrative moments have in common? What is the relationship between them? Everything and nothing. Is the answer in the woman’s emotional words on the phone? Or in her helpless expression when walking naked? Or in the happiness she seems to find in the domestic routine? Perhaps the charm is really not in trying to decipher, but in getting lost in this visual and impressionistic poem, this shake that slowly expands in our senses. Max Planck, one of the founders of the ancient quantum physics theory, said that energy has a discontinuous structure and can only exist under the form of fragments. These are the fragments that hide here an ethereal promise.

M, a water drop, wakes up for the first time. Alone in a white and glaring surface, will he discover where he belongs? Will he manage to put an end to his loneliness?

By the director: "Ar.Co embodies each person’s geography, it escapes normalisation. Each individual’s experience is his own. This film is my experience, our experience. Pieced together from the school’s archive, from recordings of classes by Manuel Castro Caldas and from conversations at home."

A man returns to his hometown many years after a forced departure. He confronts his memories from childhood and from the past, he looks for the old faces and places, but seems that they’re not there anymore. The distance grows even more.

Ico is a post-colonial hero on a strange and familiar city, going from victim to predator.

In the summer of 1969, four friends built a raft to travel down two Portuguese rivers from the center of the country to Lisbon. Forty years later, the son of one of these men reported this event in a book of poems, as a metaphor of the Portuguese travel literature of the 16Th and 17Th centuries. After, it occurred to him to turn the poems into a real event, to invite some friends to reenact the raft journey and exhibit texts from those peregrinations. His brother went along to film the floating recital.

In Victorian London lives a man of adventurous spirit and great wit, Charles Augustus Howell, art agent, art dealer, conspirator and master of blackmail.

The day starts in Lisbon and with it people return to the streets. These men live in a place which is not a home. Martins, the barber from Luanda, Simões with his spears, Manuel and his films and Francisco's silence share a place to rest, a shelter. They have some affinities with the outside world but they communicate through the words that they don't say. Perhaps the differences are clearest in everything that is silenced.

In the outskirts of London, Portuguese couple and parents of three, Bela and Jota, struggle to make ends meet. When a misunderstanding arises at school with their deaf daughter, the British social services grow concerned for the safety of their children. The film portrays the tireless battle of these immigrant parents against the law to keep their family together.

A spectacular view of the world as seen from Armando and Maria's control tower, eight floors up from the river Douro. A comic and probing portrait of an old Portuguese couple whose private life has remained permeable to the modern world.

He is a miner, everyday tries to go with the river flow. She dreams of escaping too, but she’s trapped...

In the late 70s and early 80s in the city of Porto, concerts by Rock and Punk bands began to appear. April 25, 1974, which put an end to the longest dictatorship in Europe, brought political and creative freedom. Through a series of tableaux vivants based on photos from an era covered with a nostalgic aura, but employing contemporary mannequins, the film revives some loud narrations of those crazy times, which failed to reach our ears.