Wind Vane

Maria do Mar

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.

Voodoo

All sympathetic magic is based upon two principles: the first called the Law of Similarity says that “likes produce likes,” or that an effect resembles its cause; the second, called the law of contagion or contact says that all things having been in contact with each other continue to react upon one and another at a distance even after they have been severed or disconnected. A fearful man meets a disquiet woman. Do you believe in magic?

Entrecampos

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.

Jack’s Ride

At 63 years old and almost retired, Joaquim is forced to follow job centre rules so he can collect unemployment benefits. Despite knowing that he will never return to active life, he must go from company to company asking for stamps to attest that he is looking for work. In these trips he reminisces about his life as an immigrant to the U.S., where he worked as a cab driver in New York and witnessed numerous Wall Street crashes.

Ordinary Time

One of the most far-reaching events in a human life is the birth of your baby. But life with a newborn can be so ordinary and at the same time all-embracing: the wash is drying in the corridor, the bathroom has to be cleaned. In the calm rhythm of the day, 'Ordinary Time' skims past authentic moments like this.

Cidade Rabat

When her mother dies, 40-year-old Helena now has time for herself after years of taking care of her family. She works at a film production company, dances boisterously, gets drunk. A quiet film about letting go morphs into a coming of middle age story.

Vida Activa

New Opportunities were a portuguese education program with a focus on the academic certification of adults who left school early. Applicants will improve their academic degree from the re-elaboration and re-interpretation of his "life experience." These processes motivated workers to reflect on their working conditions, their training, their roots, producing a plurality of views about the school, emigration, the rural world and the universe of employment. Having its protagonists stories as a starting point, the film approches into a reflection about work in the contemporay world. This film was produced over four years work by the film director in a New Opportunities Centre.

Waterland Song

David, wood-mask sculptor, and Adélia, ancient songs connoisseur, are the characters of this movie set in Trás-os-Montes, north-east of Portugal. They testify the neglect condition of this land, where survive traces of a prehistoric ocean.

The Luminous Life

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.

Goodbye, Beach

Struggling to settle in her first apartment, Laura returns to the space where she has always been happy, the beach where she spent holidays with her parents. For the first time, she feels the urge to say goodbye to her childhood in order to create her own space.

Death of a City

In the heart of Bairro Alto, right in the centre of Lisbon, the building of an old printing workshop is demolished to make way for luxury apartments. Seeing this as a perfect image for the death of a certain Lisbon in the wake of the financial crisis and the ensuing real estate and touristic boom, the director films an urban diary portraying the daily life of the construction site and those who work there. What starts out as a work-centred film turns out to be the story of the director’s relationship with his hometown and with the people who build it.