Diogo Salgado

In the mid-1980s, during a summer day, Rui Carlos and his friends Maranau and Tomané enjoy their free time in the neighborhood, between football matches and playful games. Rui Carlos repairs his worn-out shoes and heads out to borrow a valuable football from their neighbor, Dona Olinda, who daily entrusts it to him. As the teams are chosen and the game begins, typical neighborhood interruptions ensue: a visit from Mascote the dog, a break for lunch, and spontaneous games. But when the ball gets punctured, Rui Carlos is left to face responsibility and the realities of growing up.

As the afternoon light fades, two kids play in the woods by a lake. When one of them disappears, the lake and its inhabitants take hold of the narrative and, when the darkness sets in, build up the walls of a maze that encircles the two kids. While one wanders through the forest searching for his friend, the silhouettes, textures and sounds of the forest slowly exert their mysterious grip.

In the hot month of August, Alice and her siblings go to their grandmother’s summer house. As the days go by, the house becomes a hive of slow straying bodies, as Alice becomes more and more engrained in her grandmother’s colonial past.

Early Spring. A sonata, a train, a letter. Between his work as a flute teacher and the rituals of mourning the early death of his wife, Samuel faces a dilemma after a visit from his brother.

Thousands of workers take the ferry across Lisbon’s Tagus River every day. They’re commuters just like those you see everywhere in buses, trains and subways. In the ceaseless flow of humanity they disappear anonymously into the crowd. This film is Gonçalo Pina’s cinematic tribute to these “invisibles.”

On a hot summer day two people allow themselves to be drowned out by frivolous, strange or absurd behavior; while one of them mysteriously disappears the other cools off in a lake near a festive village.