Rafael Gonçalves Cardoso

A young sound director has a task. Rafael must record a crucial sound for a film. With his headphones on he scans the city of Lisbon, looking and listening for this elusive sonic eccentricity – his journey made harder by all sorts of disruptive noises.

Filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos sifts through the memories of her ancestors. Her naval officer grandfather, Henrique, who married her grandmother, Beatriz, on her 21st birthday, spent extended periods at sea, leaving her with six children. This is the beginning of a generational saga.

Suddenly a mysterious woman appears in the West of Portugal. Everybody had seen her, but no one knew her. Mother, fairy, angel, owner of a wine business? Lúcia Pires’s (Fauna, 2018) film questions confabulation and existence without a proof.

Her name is El - a name that sounds like a letter and makes the young androgynous woman a kind of representative of her generation. A generation that is overwhelmed by all the possibilities of the world, globalization and the digital stream. Lisbon is a promise of freedom, independence and an intense life. But the question of meaning brings doubt into everyday life: what if I were happier with someone else or called another place home? When home no longer feels like home, the search becomes routine. When El meets Kay after a break-up, in the midst of her search, their story together begins. Time, space and emotions implode in "Baan", blurring Lisbon with Bangkok, past with present.

In 1974, after years of civil war, the Portuguese and their descendants fled the colony of Angola where groups working for independence gradually claim their territory back. A tribal girl discovers love and death when her path crosses that of a young Portuguese soldier. Meanwhile, another group of Portuguese soldiers is barracked inside an infinite wall from which they will have to escape once the past comes out of the grave to claim its long-awaited justice.

A chant from another time reveals the ancient everyday gestures of a Gypsy family, anchored by the errant couple Maria and Arménio. In the flow of days and life cycles, we find resistance and celebration.

Maria starts to show signs of wanting to belong somewhere else: scales appear on her skin, roots appear on her legs, and she hears the sound of water - she dreams of being a fish. One day her daughter comes across her disappearance and reconstructs, through the memory of her gestures and meetings with her mother, a possible explanation for her escape.