Latter-Day Saints

A short time has passed. Both arrived to a point of no return, a break is the only way out. One of them has to take the first step. This morning both decide to leave, definitely, without the other realizing it. The house remains empty.

End of adolescence, end of school, the last summer before joining the working world for a group of friends from the neighbourhood of Alcoitão, "BDA".

Through a city that carries the weight of broken expectations and tough absencies, we follow the day of three young adults. César who got into a photoshoot by accident, Chloé who hopes to find a place to do her own work, and Helena who is back in her town for some days, only to find the living shadow of a loss.

Carica is only seven years old and wants a bicycle for Christmas. But his family has no money and offers him a book. The grandfather tells him the story of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. On the first day of rain and sun, Carica embarks on adventure.

Karlon, born in Pedreira dos Húngaros (a slum in the outskirts of Lisbon) and a pioneer of Cape Verdean creole rap, runs away from the housing project to which he had been relocated.

One night, a group of workers realises that the administration is stealing machines and raw materials from their own factory. As they organize to survey the equipment and block the relocation of production, they are forced to stand at their posts with no work to do, as a form of retaliation, while negotiations over general lay-offs take place. The pressure leads to a breakdown of the workers along with the world around them.

Maria de Noronha, at 13 years old, suffers from high fevers and violent hemoptysis caused by a ruthless tuberculosis. To alleviate the pain, she gathers poppies from her garden and, at night, places them on her bed pillows. But the poppies have a devastating effect. Her deep sleep is invaded by ghosts and hallucinations: the luxury and decadence of the Portuguese 16th century. A broken nation, occupied by strangers.

A portrait of the daily lives of young people living in a new-built estate on the outskirts of Lisbon. School is a joke and there’s no work to be had anyway, so the girls try to have fun as best they can. New-girl Eva is very pretty but quiet. The others aren’t sure at first whether she’s arrogant or just shy. Iara and Eva head off to the beach with two boys. The lads turn a couple of abandoned shopping trolleys into racing chariots for them and the atmosphere begins to tingle. Later, they argue with the rest of the group. The other girls manage to get into a club that night but the boys don’t and must kick their heels outside. They’re bent on revenge. They meet up with Eva and go back to her place.

“Campo de Marte” (The Field of Mars) was in the ancient times Rome’s training arena for war. At the outskirts of Lisbon, “Campo” hosts today Europe’s largest military base. In this place military troops train fictional missions, astronomy aficionados observe the stars and a boy plays the piano for the wild deers lurking in the dark.

The young and promising genetics researcher Thomas Nielsen will stop at nothing to become the first person to identify the elements in man that trigger aggression. To achieve faster results he performs illegal tests on the convicted mass murderer Iparrah. But when Thomas one day gets caught, he injects the unauthorized test agent itself. This turns out to have unexpected effects ...

The Ave Valley is, for more than a century, a territory seized by an imposing industry. Amongst ruins and operating factories, we descend the river on a journey alongside the banks of the present, unveiling the marks of the past.

This film tries to make a silent record of the arrival of an economy of scale, its flows, and its effects upon the transformation of an island’s physical and human landscape.

In Cascais, the “greatest band in the world,” with “the best album of all time” in tow, landed in the land of all illusions, where the grayness of decades gave way to color, nightlife, controversy, debate, and effervescent citizenship. Thirty years later, previously unreleased testimonies, sounds, and images from the show reconstruct a puzzle of indelible memories for a generation that in 1975 was young or a teenager.

In order to reflect upon current practices of political dissent, we delve into the past and follow the experiences of a young artist. Invited to go underground in Portugal, during the second half of the 20th century, Margarida Tengarrinha played an important role in anti-fascist resistance, becoming a forger out of political activism. Given the anachronism, Clandestina is like a letter to a time yet to come, a premonition of the tragic possibility of History repeating itself.

Maria starts to show signs of wanting to belong somewhere else: scales appear on her skin, roots appear on her legs, and she hears the sound of water - she dreams of being a fish. One day her daughter comes across her disappearance and reconstructs, through the memory of her gestures and meetings with her mother, a possible explanation for her escape.

Mother and son move into a new house, a new city, a new story.