Laura

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.

What the ocean bringeth, the ocean taketh away

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?

In a rural landscape, that resembles an old Portugal, an elderly man find out that his wife, whom he believed to be dead, was seen shopping in town. Spiteful and sad, he wants to hide from everyone, but his friends insist that he uses this situation to become stronger and try to get married again.

Jorge de Sena was forced to leave his country. First he moved to Brazil, and later to the USA. He never returned to Portugal. During his 20-year-long exile, he kept an epistolary correspondence with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. These letters are a testimony of the profound friendship between the two poets, letters of longing and of desire to “fill years of distance with hours of conversation”. Through excerpts and verses, a dialog is established, revealing their divergent opinions but mostly their strong bond, and their efforts to preserve it until their last breaths.

A kino-investigation about spectatorship, a continuous conversation between different kinds of spectators: which one is more cinema: Citizen Kane on a mobile phone or a football game projected in a cinema theatre? What is the cinema of uncertainty? How many kinds of amazement exist? Does fear and belief precede amazement? What are the rights and duties of the spectator? Is the essay film a manifesto against voyeurism? Should spectators be paid? What amazes the spectator of this day and age?

Azarias is a young orphan shepherd, keeper of a herd of oxen, where the ox Mabata Bata stands out. The oxen will be the basis of the "lobolo" payment, a traditional dowry that his uncle Raul must pay for his own marriage. Azarias’ dream is to be a normal child, to go to school, goals that are supported by his grandmother. One day, when Azariah is in the pasture, Mabata Bata steps into a mine - the result of the civil war in the country - and explodes. The young man fears his uncle's reprisals and flees to the forest, taking with him the remaining oxen. The grandmother and uncle leave in their quest to rescue him and persuade him to return.

I am the double of the shadow of my own image. An allegory that occupies my place. This is my act of contrition. Beyond good and evil, I stand as an equation: Its result cannot be manipulated By morals or ethics. In mathematics there is no place for beliefs Just as life and death Are a certain fate.

A triptych of short stereoscopic films by Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard and Edgar Pêra. Includes "The Three Disasters" by Godard, "Cinesapiens" by Pêra and "Just in Time" by Greenaway.

Teresa evokes a memory. A memory as a place of resistance. A memory suspended in space and time. A place one can return to. The fragmented image of an intimate record. The impression of moments forgotten in time but ready to emerge from oblivion—moments that allow us to build a possible history: the history we want to see. – Tânia Dinis

The story of a vigilante friar, zealous caretaker of goodness and order who, after suffering unrequited love for an engaged woman, becomes a terrifying villain in a quiet town.

An effervescent painterly film tribute – replete with driving organ soundtrack – to 18th-century poet and satirist António Lobo de Carvalho, otherwise known as The Wolf of Madragoa.

This film combines fictional and documentary treatment and uses photographic archives, real images and the oral testimony of women from the regions of Trás-os-Montes, Beira, Alto and Baixo Minho who, between the 1940s and 1980s, came to Porto to work as domestic servants.

Your past already is the projection of your future. However, it was never more than a light in the sky.

"Wood was uninterruptedly burning in the home, of that centrifugal place whose actors still offered new worlds to the world born from the sweat of their brows and the clandestine sap of their dreams." Regina Guimarães