Helena Domingos

In this highly theatrical TV production, Monteiro again draws on the world of folklore – and, more precisely, on the widespread sexual connotation of the pomegranate – to tell a tale of love, envy, treason and mistaken/double identities.

Adaptation of a Portuguese traditional tale. A travelling man rests at a inn. While sleeping, three beautiful women tell him where to go, the black islands, where he can find them and marry the one that is a princess.

The film was to be a documentary, but evolved during production to a fictional film. It nevertheless adheres strictly to the poems and letters exchanged by two of the most outstanding names of the Modernist Movement, Fernando Pessoa (in Lisbon) and Mário de Sá-Carneiro (in Paris). Their endless conversation was dramatically and suddenly terminated.

Ambulatory history, freely inspired by Georg Büchner's biography (1813-37) and the reasons that led him first to political intervention and then to strict isolation. With students of unidentified present time (1968? 1970?), the themes developed, in Büchner, are triggered by the publication of "The Messenger of Hesse", a pamphlet addressed to the peasants, urging them to revolt. Their misunderstanding, as well as the repression of the young revolutionaries, leads Büchner to a particularly skeptical and painful attitude...