Saguenail

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."

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…

Maria and Matías feel life is slipping through their fingers, and turn to birds, real and imagined, in a search for meaning and connection.

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 A commission by Serralves Foundation to Regina Guimarães and Saguenail, and constructed after an unpublished interview with Luis Miguel Cintra, this film is the result of a long and painstaking exercise of selecting and editing excerpts from films by Manoel de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.

A man looks at himself in the mirror and does not recognise himself. That man is me. An old, tired, wounded man. So he wanders around in circles, looking for a woman who would look at him (and recognise him).

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.

From Manet's painting – Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe – two women and two men slip from the timelessness of the museum into our present day. They have come to picnic and enjoy a pleasant swim in the river. The men approach them and, with little attempt to conceal their aggressive libidinous intentions, threaten the happiness of the moment, the serenity of the place, and the integrity of the bathers. This fragment of Eden and everything around it is inhabited by a naturalized social violence...

Carolina, an aging local grande dame who works at a crossing point on the titular river, marries another late-in-life character, the dredging-boat operator Antonio. Not long after their union, she becomes intensely jealous of Antonio's fondness for their winsome goddaughter, Joana, and insinuates herself into a relationship brewing between Joana and a mystical gypsy gold salesman. Soon, tempers are flaring, mystical secrets are being revealed and death is hovering over the central characters.

In an enclosed space of a café for an entire night, a set of characters try to verbalize their thirst for love and their fear that love will overwhelm them.

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.

An act of passion, filmed in a church turned into a bar, on Easter 2003, and starring as many actors as the days of the year… Taking the sacred painting as a reference, the film questions the human condition: letting oneself die like Christ or betray scientifically like Peter?

Based on biographical data that refer to, and transform, the experiences, aspirations, memories, etc. of the performer, Alma Depenada stages the need to dialogue with the double(s), whose corollary is, paradoxically, to harass them, chase them away, and ultimately kill them.

Portrait of a time and a country through the plotless story of an unassuming couple, questioning seeming antagonisms that conceal mysterious kinships, and highlighting an intrinsic contradiction of cinema: while fabricating images, film language creates objects that are deeply different from the original models

Antónia didn't play with dolls, nor did she learn to read and write at the age when children go to school and don't usually sell their labor power. She experienced the harsh social inequalities of Salazarism. Used to toiling from sun up to sun down, work is still her "sport" today. She regrets that those who miss the dictatorship are not forced to experience in the flesh what fascism was like... She tells us all this while her hands prepare the dough for the Easter cakes, scented with aniseed, with the zeal of a master.

A documentary view of the practices of popular culture in the most jubilant of the local pagan festivities.

We're at war. Every day, bombs explode. Everywhere. The terrorist attack is unstoppable. The enemy is invisible. And yet as weapons they are alike. There are common interests. And the common denominator is financial. The alliance game is constantly traded and modified on the world chessboard. The shares do not follow the course of the shares on the Stock Exchange. There are victims but the damages are all collateral. It is necessary to reconstruct a geography as a History is rewritten. And I think every window is a mirror, every image a reflection. Eight symbolic characters that represent metaphorically some of the forces that dominate the contemporary world: USA, Russia, Europe, Third World; Major sectors: Armament, Energy Resources, Finance, Bureaucracy; Ideological Oppositions: Traditionalist Past, Youth Revolted, Cynical Opportunism, Conformist Disenchantment - playing a game of verbal chess for a moment may decide the near future.

America is a legend, an idea. To rediscover the traces of such an idea within the reality of a city requires a transformation of this very city into ideas and legends, to the point that life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, that which can be communicated, and that which cannot,high and low are open to a contradictory understanding. Film made between 1981 and 1985.

A film by Saguenail