Pedro Cabrita Reis

A film adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel "Hard Times" set in a Portuguese industrial town of the 1980s.

Francisca, a beautiful 50-year-old widow, prepared a peaceful future for herself. In an unexpected outburst, she grabs an opportunity for change and embarks on a sailboat called ‘Hovering Over the Water’.

An astronaut, known only as The Survivor, returns from space only to find Earth a desolate, post-nuclear wasteland. Spending the next ten years searching for others, he finds rumors and signs of a hidden underground city. He finds a woman who claims to know where the city is, but she is kidnapped before she can tell him. Desperate to locate this hidden remnant of humanity, he begins his pursuit of her captors.

This dark and intense drama follows the slow and painful destruction of a young, passive woman as she watches her family fall apart. Maria is the shy and dutiful daughter upon whose shoulders the family traumas have fallen. In addition to a regular job she cooks, cleans, and studies. Her parents offer no assistance as her father is blind, with a tendency towards violence when drinking. His wife, the focus of his violence is terribly unhappy. After a particularly brutal beating, Maria's brothers rise up against the father and end up leaving the home. It is up to Maria to try to bring the factions together. Maria's pressures increase after she calmly stabs her boss during an attempted rape, and then copes with her mother's suicide.

A story about character created by Reinaldo Ferreira (1897-1935), action reporter, mystery novelist and emotion journalist.

Lisbon, on a winter day in 1994, between six and fourteen o'clock. A forty-year-old woman despairs in the last eight hours preceding the birth of her first child.