João Pedro Rodrigues

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

A filmmaker returns to Macao, China, to help a friend who is in trouble.

Sergio is a brooding, alienated man who works as a trash collector in Lisbon by day and roams the city streets by night seeking rough, anonymous sex with men. One night he meets a man who seems to be the embodiment of his tormented fantasies, and he becomes obsessed with the stranger until loneliness and unfulfilled desire propel him finally into a dark and dangerous animalistic state.

On his deathbed, His Majesty Alfredo, King without a crown, is taken back to distant youth memories from the time when he dreamt of becoming a fireman. His encounter with instructor Afonso from the fire brigade, opens a new chapter in the life of the two young men devoted to love and desire, and the will to change the status quo.

After breaking up with her boyfriend, a woman named Odete descends into madness and claims to be pregnant with the child of her neighbour Pedro, who died in a car crash and is mourned by his boyfriend Rui.

Tradition says that on 13 June, Saint Anthony’s Day (the national holiday of Lisbon’s patron), lovers must offer small vases of basil with paper carnations and flags with popular poems as a token of their love.

Miracles still happen—or so they say… What is the place of the sacred in the contemporary world? Looking again at a myth that haunts us, that of Saint Anthony of Lisbon (and also of Padua), through the timeless painting of Goya, 13 Alfinetes is a story of love, revenge, and blood. It begins with a reenactment of an episode supposedly occurring in medieval Lisbon, filtered through the cosmopolitan 18th-century Madrid, and returning to Lisbon today, where miracles, in truth, no longer happen.

Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones.

Chico wakes up on his 30th birthday to the sound of his girlfriend singing “Happy Birthday” to him on his answering machine. When João wakes up in bed next to him, he realizes that this is not his typical birthday.

Stranded along a sublime river fjord in northern Portugal, an ornithologist is subjected to a series of brutal and erotic Stations-of-the-Cross-style tests.

The film is set in Lisbon, and tells the story of a day in the life of Rita and Paulo, a Portuguese young couple of the 90's. The fast changing city around them makes them wish to break with all traditions and live the day the get married (only civil marriage) like it is an ordinary day.

A game of references and a tribute to director Jacques Demy. It’s also an opportunity for the two directors to recall Demy’s A Room in Town (the film’s namesake) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and the importance these movies had for them.

A transgender woman attempts to rehabilitate her younger, drug-addicted boyfriend while also dealing with her ne’er-do-well son, a soldier who’s gone AWOL.

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.

Welcome to Lisbon: there are mermaids by the Tagus and birds flying over the old city; there are mad scientists and singing fish; lost tourist guides and lost tourists; fado and sad guitars. What a weird city you may think - but no. Lisbon is about being different, sarcastic, welcoming to foreigners even in an economic crisis. Different directors became fascinated by our strangeness. We became fascinated by these directors. The city is never the same in these four episodes, here in Lisbon.

China walks towards the Lisbon district of Martim Moniz. In its wake, the children shout: China! China! China will leave at dawn, will fly away. Just wants to be happy. But drinking her own poison without leaving a drop. Sometimes the air is laden with iniquity and purgatory is a kindergarten...

From our window one can see a set of the film The Green Years, directed by Paulo Rocha in 1963. This was our starting point: guided by Rocha's gaze, we look back at the places of that film. The successive geological, urbanistic and social strata of Lisbon, besieged by the pandemic that interrupted the shooting, are drawn out in front of our camera, like a contemporary jazz impro from a score written in 1963.

Varziela, Vila do Conde, the biggest Chinatown in Portugal. A man wearing a hat and a missing woman. A high-heeled shoe, a blond wig and a Chinese dress. The confrontation between the East Wind and the Red Dragon; the cardinal points switched as in an ultimate Mahjong game.

João Pedro Rodrigues' gradutation short film.

Mário, eight years old, a kid who begs in the tourist paradise of Madeira island. One day in his life, from morning to evening.

The word panchão was first heard in Macao. From the Chinese pan-tcheong or pau-tcheong, dictionaries define it as a Macanese regionalism also known as China cracker. Who inhabits the ancient IEC Long firecracker factory?

From 7 to 25 April, 18 days of confinement during which a male blackbird takes care and guarantees the safety of its young, until they release the nest.

The Red Market in Macao. The red tonalities of blood, flesh, buckets and even of the fish’s eyes, carry the audience into a strange and scary universe but also beautiful and intriguing. Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata’s camera emerges like a driving force giving us the exact balance between what exists and what we see.