Cristina Reis

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.

A renowned symbol of Portuguese interventionist theatre, Cornucópia emerged from the darkness of fascism to fight dictatorship on stage. Among the classics, a project is born and dies, but one face remains emblematic: Luís Miguel Cintra, who shared his art with the constant complicity of set designer Cristina Reis. Together, guided by images, they bear witness, telling this story.

This film depicts the life of the 19th-century Portuguese writer Wenceslau De Moraes by means of nine ancient ballads from China. The writer married a Chinese woman after he left his wife and family to go live in Macao. Later, he moved to Japan where he fell in love with a Japanese woman, staying in Japan for the rest of his life. Mixed in with the career and loves of Moraes is the history of Portugal at home and in its colonies.