João Guerra

The film's starting point was an exhibit at the Centre of Modern Art (Gulbenkian) in Lisbon. By evoking a time in the past and the adventures of the artist's generation, Silva Melo is able to depict the oeuvre and the artistic persona of António Palolo.

Catalyst in the story of crossed paths is a 1957 Ford Fairlane being driven through Portugal’s Alentejo region to a new owner. Film’s overly protracted opening has car’s drivers (Filipe Cochofel, Antonio Pedro Figueiredo) joy riding the night away until the roadster breaks down. Momentum picks up at sunrise with their attempts to fix the car. A retired mechanic-turned-beekeeper with a heart condition (Canto e Castro) does the trick and convinces Figueiredo to take him cross-country on a motorbike to look up an old friend. Cochofel and the mechanic’s alarmed niece (Maysa Marta) follow in pursuit. The old man dies peacefully on the road, but Figueiredo, having wholeheartedly grasped his deliverance mission, keeps going.

Indefatigable worker and in multiple artistic fronts, the architect Raul Lino (1879-1974) left us a fundamental work for the understanding of the Portuguese ways of being and inhabiting. The film approaches that legacy starting from texts published by the architect, which place the problematic of the House in a much wider context than that placed by the problems of construction itself. Imagined and drawn for people, being so mirrors of their personalities, tastes and memoires, Houses are the meeting-point between Man, Art and Nature. Therefore, the tremendous responsibility of Architecture: of those who make it and those who uses it.

In the quietness of rural life, small disputes about the right to use a rivulet may take the proportion of a life-and-death matter..

The elder matriarch of a dysfunctional family is mistankenly declared dead.