João Rosas

New Opportunities were a portuguese education program with a focus on the academic certification of adults who left school early. Applicants will improve their academic degree from the re-elaboration and re-interpretation of his "life experience." These processes motivated workers to reflect on their working conditions, their training, their roots, producing a plurality of views about the school, emigration, the rural world and the universe of employment. Having its protagonists stories as a starting point, the film approches into a reflection about work in the contemporay world. This film was produced over four years work by the film director in a New Opportunities Centre.

It's summer in Lisbon and Nicolau is an undecided boy. Among his doubts about the university course to follow and what kind of girl to choose for his girlfriend, Nicolau spends his days trying to figure out who he wants to be when he's bigger. The problem is, he's about to finish the secondary exams, he is already big, without having things clearer. From indecision to indecision, Nicolau navigates in sight, with the only compass for his possible choices being the girls he is going to fall in love and with those he imagine as many possible futures.

All sympathetic magic is based upon two principles: the first called the Law of Similarity says that “likes produce likes,” or that an effect resembles its cause; the second, called the law of contagion or contact says that all things having been in contact with each other continue to react upon one and another at a distance even after they have been severed or disconnected. A fearful man meets a disquiet woman. Do you believe in magic?

When her mother dies, 40-year-old Helena now has time for herself after years of taking care of her family. She works at a film production company, dances boisterously, gets drunk. A quiet film about letting go morphs into a coming of middle age story.

Mariana is an 11 years old girl coming from Serpa who just moved to Lisbon with her father. The first days are spent in the city cleaning the house and knowing the new neighborhood, Entrecampos. After the first day of school, Mariana gets lost coming home and has to call her father for help. The next day, she becomes friends with a boy in her class, Nicholau, and his older brother, Simão. The two brothers invite Mariana for lunch and help her to get home.

It’s springtime in Lisbon and Nicolau turns 24, but he’s not celebrating. Living in his parents’ house, hostage to a dream of being a musician that never comes true and plagued by the ideal image of an ex-girlfriend who left him a year ago and never came back, Nicolau feels incapable of moving forward and inventing a life of his own. He takes odd jobs until the day he discovers that his mother is just as dissatisfied with life as he is. Nicolau is shaken, but he doesn’t stumble.

David, wood-mask sculptor, and Adélia, ancient songs connoisseur, are the characters of this movie set in Trás-os-Montes, north-east of Portugal. They testify the neglect condition of this land, where survive traces of a prehistoric ocean.

At 63 years old and almost retired, Joaquim is forced to follow job centre rules so he can collect unemployment benefits. Despite knowing that he will never return to active life, he must go from company to company asking for stamps to attest that he is looking for work. In these trips he reminisces about his life as an immigrant to the U.S., where he worked as a cab driver in New York and witnessed numerous Wall Street crashes.