Joana Vasconcelos: Coração Independente

Lisbon, Portugal, 2010. Pilar, a pious woman devoted to social causes, maintains a peculiar relationship with her neighbor Aurora, a temperamental old woman obsessed with gambling who lives tormented by a mysterious past.

A look back at the history of Brancusi's futuristic golden bronze phallus "Princess X" that is in fact a bust of Napoleon's incredible great-niece, Marie Bonaparte.

Mariana is an 11 years old girl coming from Serpa who just moved to Lisbon with her father. The first days are spent in the city cleaning the house and knowing the new neighborhood, Entrecampos. After the first day of school, Mariana gets lost coming home and has to call her father for help. The next day, she becomes friends with a boy in her class, Nicholau, and his older brother, Simão. The two brothers invite Mariana for lunch and help her to get home.

When a terminally ill French actress decides to spend her last vacation with her large family in Sintra, her relatives grapple with their own insecurities.

Manuel bids farewell to his routine and boards a 15th century vessel under pirate law. Treason on board triggers a series of terrible events our protagonist overcomes while keeping his moral principles intact.

On a summer's day, a mother, daughter and granddaughter's care-free day trip comes to an abrupt end. Beautiful and restrained.

A theatre having national as part of its name, at the top of a square, reflecting a country’s history. But which one? This is a voyage through the various narratives about D. Maria II National Theatre, forged through the intentions of the several regimes that intended to convey their own ideologies within the theatre’s mission. This is also the story of those who fought against it, opposed the institution and became part of it. How can one become heir of these stories, even if never having set foot inside.

A journey inside the tram crossing the city of Lisbon while listening to fragments of Fernando Pessoa's poetry.

How to represent an artistic intention without reducing it to a description? How to do it preserving the intentionality of the gestus in an ambiguous andsubjective space where the individualism of the artistic perspective is set. “my maladresse…” proposes a viewpoint over Ana Jotta’s universe. An analogous portrait of her relations as an artist is created, setting parallel questions, as hermeneutics possibility and art as a value system. The link relating the trio (artist and director’s deuce) balances between familiarity, master and apprentice, subject and object; the distance and authority of the one behind the camera spreading light around artisticurgencies concerning how Work and Life overlay in this unquiet chase of the greater purpose: a search for consolation in the holy_burlesque of existential functionalism. A documental laboratory of reflexive limits.

Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos (1931-2008), engraver, painter, is one of the great artists of the 20th century. His world is the crepuscular world of the end of the Portuguese Empire, he who created the first metaphors against the Portuguese Colonialism. And who, with constant vitality, has opposed himself against the New World Order. Knowing, with Eliot, that “the past and the future time are both always present on the present time”

Fernando Lopes in the first person: through his words and films, from the village where he was born until Lisbon of present time, we discover the themes and emotions of the work of one of the main authors of portuguese "Cinema Novo".

Mike, half Swiss, half American, is a friend of Portuguese director Fernando Lopes. He’s a painter and has been living in Portugal for 30 years, making him also Portuguese. His stage name is Michael Biberstein. His internationally acclaimed works belong to some of the most important collections and museums around the world. He and Fernando Lopes decided to embrace this adventure after a conversation they had in a mutual friend’s house. The result is this movie: an inner journey about the creation of a painting where its silence, its mystery and magic were filmed.