The Gravedigger

Expectante is a fiction that emulates some apparently dangerous situations evoking the constant paranoia of an insecurity city's people.

Northern Portugal. An imposing residence with its garden and magnolia tree. As we know, home is a place that film, this outdoor art, has often used to depict less the joys of family life than a pernicious space. André Gil Mata has made it his stage, with its rooms, its furniture, what plays out there and what has already played out there. From one room to another, from one era to another, the film delves deep into this enclosed space, a kind of suffocating box.

A man, a child, two wars, a river, a tree. A man and a child meet under a tree on a river bank, sharing the same memory and a secret. They find in each other the serenity, the silence and the time they lost in the flowing water of the river.

In Sarajevo, in a cinema’s projection booth, lives Sena; a woman who in daily solitude repeats the projection of the few Yugoslavian films of which there are copies. Through a combination of silence, the everyday gestures of this woman and the films that are projected from her living room, comes a film built like a day in Sena’s life. Through the films that Sena projects, we are taken on a journey in both collective and personal memory. The film offers a portrait of intimacy crossed with a history witnessed by cinema; a history which Sena has conserved.

Joana, seven years old, waits for her mother to recover from an illness. She wiles away the hours in her grandfather’s warehouse of antiques.

Melgaço, Parada do Monte. The memory of a chance encounter on the border between the real and the imagined, the affection and superstition, has been passed down from generation to generation.

Three men wash ashore in a forgotten cove, where time seems to have stood still. Surrounded by volcanic rocks and tides, they find themselves confined in a place as beautiful as it is inhospitable. As the days go by, a strange presence begins to insinuate itself among them.

In a lake surrounded by buildings, a man builds a boat.

Caught in time, a trio of prehistoric characters lives around a dolmen. One of them, who is hyperactive, tries to stir his mates emotions with inventions and works of art. A strange object made out of bone, which re frames reality, will trigger greed and envy in them. Super 8 allegorical on Portugal, and the collective behavior of its people.

The River Douro, in Porto, is the area of the Portuguese maritime territory where most suicides by precipitation occur. Gastão dedicates his life to rescuing these bodies, not trying to save them, instead giving them back to their families so they can have a closure.

Europe’s largest lithium mine is about to start operating in Trás-os-Montes, much to the dismay of the local inhabitants. Frederico Lopo induces an earthy sensuality and contrasts two geologies: that of mining prospection and machines, and that of roots and people.

Ubu, instigated by his wife, murders King Venceslau and usurps the throne of Poland. Intoxicated by power, this grotesque and coward character conducts his reign in an absurd and cruel way, leading his kingdom to ruin. A cinematographic adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s play, a political satire that, cyclically, turns to the reality of world politics.

In an ominous Lisbon courtyard where the last executioner of the kingdom once lived, an accident is waiting to happen. After a patient game of who's observing who, four characters will collide with dire consequences. Inspired by the novel The Damned Yard by Nobel Prize-winning Bosnian writer Ivo Andrić, this is a masterclass in slow cinema, a pure 16mm cinematic pleasure by André Gil Mata.

Director Júlio Bessa, who suffers from "stage fright" will make an introduction to his latest film at Festival de Cinema Luso Brasileiro in Santa Maria da Feira.

In one of the last rural schools on the border between Galicia and Portugal, Mariana, a four-year-old girl, discovers the world through the stories and legends told by her teacher. As Mariana grows, these tales and the passage of time shape her view of the world, until at eighteen, she faces a crucial decision: to leave her village or remain in this borderland by her mother’s side.