I can't hold back love

A Northern Irish businessman gets stuck in the middle of the Portuguese countryside while on a business trip.

It’s springtime in Lisbon and Nicolau turns 24, but he’s not celebrating. Living in his parents’ house, hostage to a dream of being a musician that never comes true and plagued by the ideal image of an ex-girlfriend who left him a year ago and never came back, Nicolau feels incapable of moving forward and inventing a life of his own. He takes odd jobs until the day he discovers that his mother is just as dissatisfied with life as he is. Nicolau is shaken, but he doesn’t stumble.

It's a summer weekend in a country house near Sintra, in Portugal. Fourteen-year-old Nicolau is spending a couple of days with his older brother Simão and his friends, all of them in their late twenties. Everyone is drawn to the beautiful and quiet Maria do Mar, but Nicolau will see his life the most deeply shaken by her. Between homework and tree-climbing, stories about a deceased philandering grandfather and the origins of the tortellini's shape, a friend in a costume nursing a broken heart and seduction games, Nicolau observes this group of young adults.

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.

It's summer in Lisbon and Nicolau is an undecided boy. Among his doubts about the university course to follow and what kind of girl to choose for his girlfriend, Nicolau spends his days trying to figure out who he wants to be when he's bigger. The problem is, he's about to finish the secondary exams, he is already big, without having things clearer. From indecision to indecision, Nicolau navigates in sight, with the only compass for his possible choices being the girls he is going to fall in love and with those he imagine as many possible futures.

A few dead people, a couple, a young man who likes taxidermy and his grandmother, a mechanic, a detective. And other people. Trivial conversations among a group of people who live on the fringes of the law and deal with corpses.