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.

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.

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.

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.

João Pedro Rodrigues' gradutation short film.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

From the music of Lebanese composer Gabriel Yared, Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues crafts a story reminiscent of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, showcasing an idyllic day in a Portuguese city that ends with a young man's awakening limned in darkness. This short film is part of the 2x25 Project of Film Fest Gent and the World Soundtrack Awards. The project commissioned 25 composers to compose a short piece of music, after which 25 filmmakers made short films that are the ultimate symbioses of music and cinematography, fitting completely within the DNA of the festival. The result: 25 exceptional films where the music inspired the form, narrative and texture.

On the phone in his dark bedroom, a man relives the end of a turbulent affair, while across town, the city burns.

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.

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.

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.

How would it look like, the body of Dom Afonso Henriques, first king of Portugal, tutelary figure, subject to successive mythifications throughout Portuguese history?

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.

João Pedro Rodrigues answers the question from the title with an autobiographical short-film.

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.

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?

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 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.