Interview with Yvonne Bezerra De Mello

Seventeen experts on history and arts deliver brief lessons on their favorite subjects, considered the most relevant to cover nine hundred years of Portuguese culture. The camera shows from a distance, or in minute detail, the monuments or art pieces considered, or even the texts discussed by the narrators, reenacted on stage or recited by actors.

Redheaded twins Armando and Beatriz always dreamed of being firefighters but during a rainy, uneventful winter they find themselves spending less time putting out infernos than they do helping neighbors who’ve locked themselves out of their apartments. This is how Armando meets a pretty young woman with whom he begins a tentative courtship. But soon a rift grows between the siblings and, spurred by Armando’s exaggerated stories about his nascent relationship, Beatriz begins experiencing aural hallucinations that can only be remedied through music and, finally, the love of a stranger. Pinto made this impassioned fairy tale as part of a series of films about the four elements. - FilmLinc

Lisbon, 1989. A middle-aged poor man, tormented by an illness, lives in a cheap room in a family boarding house, in the old section of the city's waterfront.

An impossible love. Two young people who love each other. Vera and João can’t find in this life the space, time, or identity to resolve their love story.

Laura Rossellini, a widow from Rome, vacations on the Algarve coast one hot summer. One day while sunbathing, she finds a wounded man named Robert drifting in the surf on a rubber raft. She takes him home, and, after he is revived, learns his story. As they talk, their mutual attraction grows, until a group of armed men suddenly arrive looking for Robert.

When the child Manuel wanders into a garden that is off-limits to him, he meets an unidentified fisherman, and another boy -- the boy is actually himself several years down the road. Manuel experiences three different versions of his encounters in the garden, revealing that fate can have several twists and turns in one's life, depending on decisions that are made early on.

A long-hidden, personal doc about leaving a beloved house by the late, revered Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.

Centered on an elderly matriarch and her family in the Trás-os-Montes region of Portugal. An exploration of the cycle of life and death, using the main character, Ana, as an emblem of a life lived in harmony with nature and tradition.

A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities.

After receiving a visit from a messenger of God, João de Deus wins his buddy's girlfriend through a roll of the dice.

The story of a child who faces the emptiness that surrounds the figure of his parents, disappeared in Africa.

An ice-cream seller lusts after the female employees in his shop.

Manoel de Oliveira plays his film in three stages: the first part - a play, the second can be roughly defined as a silent film (with the behind the scenes read excerpts from Beckett works), but in the end the director brilliantly performs the same material of the avant-garde exercise. Surprisingly, a joke, repeated three times, each time everything sounds fresh and develops into an almost verbatim adaptation of the biblical "Book of Job" - a spectacular point in a parable about how hard to empathize with other people's misery, when you have your own.

A mentally unstable woman and her son move to a sprawling mansion in Portugal to grow roses.

Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures.

A small group of well-to-do vacationers go on a hiking trip into the woods just to find themselves mysteriously lost.