Ornament and Crime

Penumbria was founded two hundred years ago, in a distant istmus - a place of arid soils, angry seas and violent weather. The city was due its name to the almost permanent shadows and cloudiness. One day, its inhabitants decided to leave, offering Penumbria to time. This is the story of an uninhabitable place.

Inspired by popular cult, O COVEIRO is part light part darkness, a bedtime story and almost a nightmare. A child is born and his parents die of fright just to see him. André Gil Mata revisits the traditional Portuguese tale, in a fantastic movie where heads bounce, but you hear a song.

Téo, a lunar teenager, meets the new parish priest of his rural village, who has just arrived from Mozambique. As the two grow closer, they develop a spiritual bond steeped in attraction.

The last habitants of a village refuse to let themselves sink into oblivion.

An actress goes to Azores to take part in the theatrical tour of The Tempest and on her arrival she finds no one from the company, there is not even a theatre. After meeting Ariel, the actress discovers that the play has already started, the whole island is a theatre and its inhabitants are characters.

There is a village in the mountain and a house in the village, where Ema repeats gestures and tasks: she takes care of her grandmother, walks, reads, waits. Until one day the cycle breaks: what happened in the mountain house?

A little girl, Ana, reads herself to sleep. As she dozes off, the physical world starts melting into an alternate reality where the contents of a book rule over the laws of physics. Now, she has to escape being swallowed by the overwhelming accumulation of printed knowledge and find her own space in a world where nothing is what it seems.

A school inspector travels to the baron’s fiefdom to write a report on a heathen teacher. Having arrived, he is invited to stay with the baron, who makes predictions about women, horses and politics while the mysterious Idalina serves food and drink. The inspector becomes inextricably entangled in the baron’s world.

Ribeira Quente is a fishing village in S. Miguel Island in the Azores facing the last days of a fishing activity as they know it.

Jake and Mati are two outsiders in the northerly Portuguese city of Porto who once experienced a brief connection. A mystery remains about the moments they shared, and in searching through memories, they relive the depths of a night uninhibited by the consequences of time.

Who is Sycorax? The first character in Shakespeare's "Tempest" to set foot on the island. The problem is that she has no voice. She is barely mentioned by Prospero as a crooked, old, wicked witch who vilely locked Ariel, the spirit of the air, in a tree. But why would she do that? Here, we wouldn't believe Prospero so much.

Follows Hugo as he takes a gap year and returns to Porto to regain balance with his family, but he attends a concert by Luís Stockman, who plays a theme that Hugo has been writing in his head for years.

Oscar is a child germinating in its parent’s garden. Its body is developping underground. Nobody knows its biological sex but he wants to be a boy. One day, Oscar gets out of the ground and discovers his female body. After this painful discovery, is his desired identity finally going to be accepted?

Nora comes out of prison. She only has one thing in mind: finding a youg neo-punk artist she admires, Léa. Mirror of one another, these two soulmates will get to know each other and rebuild their lives together.

A mysterious shadow unveiling a female figure walking naked towards us in the desert. In another sequence, the same woman speaks on the phone, talking about the end of the world. In a third moment, a couple prepares breakfast in their apartment, with the same woman from the previous sequences embracing a baby. What will these three narrative moments have in common? What is the relationship between them? Everything and nothing. Is the answer in the woman’s emotional words on the phone? Or in her helpless expression when walking naked? Or in the happiness she seems to find in the domestic routine? Perhaps the charm is really not in trying to decipher, but in getting lost in this visual and impressionistic poem, this shake that slowly expands in our senses. Max Planck, one of the founders of the ancient quantum physics theory, said that energy has a discontinuous structure and can only exist under the form of fragments. These are the fragments that hide here an ethereal promise.

A ghostly meeting with Luís de Camões, the one-eyed adventurer, widely considered Portugal’s greatest poet. Luís de Camões is considered Portugal’s national poet, an equivalent to England’s Shakespeare or Spain’s Cervantes. João Lopes’s film takes us on an otherworldly journey to Camões’s five-hundred-year-old epic Os Lusíadas, which he composed in Macau whilst he was stationed in the colony.