Vasco Barbedo

Over the two and half years that he spent in the Casa de Santo Antonio in Lisbon, Philippe Costantini followed the arrivals and departures of very young mothers, from their pregnancy through to the first years with their child. At the centre of this small community of teenagers and their new-borns, the exclusively female staff see to it that the residents, whose family situations are chaotic, obey the rules. Keeping off-screen an often-mentioned violence, the film focuses on the daily lessons in mothering. What then emerges is everything that cannot be taught and which creates a fine dividing line between having a child and becoming a mother.

Jorge de Sena was forced to leave his country. First he moved to Brazil, and later to the USA. He never returned to Portugal. During his 20-year-long exile, he kept an epistolary correspondence with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. These letters are a testimony of the profound friendship between the two poets, letters of longing and of desire to “fill years of distance with hours of conversation”. Through excerpts and verses, a dialog is established, revealing their divergent opinions but mostly their strong bond, and their efforts to preserve it until their last breaths.

At night, a group of men gather on the stadium of an elite school they once attended. Some of them are the big winners in this new society. Colonists on their own land, they look away so as not to see the gangrene that is growing there.