Through the Haze

On a hot summer day two people allow themselves to be drowned out by frivolous, strange or absurd behavior; while one of them mysteriously disappears the other cools off in a lake near a festive village.

Lucas, the cook, seduces America, the television star and presidential candidate. He will clandestinely enter her house to seduce her with extraordinary meals, causing the unlikely intersection of the fate of Lucas, the cook, with that of America, the President.

Early Spring. A sonata, a train, a letter. Between his work as a flute teacher and the rituals of mourning the early death of his wife, Samuel faces a dilemma after a visit from his brother.

Inspired on the true events of the Portuguese king Don Pedro (14th Century) which unburied his mistress to make her queen after dead. This film tells the story of Pedro, a man admitted to a psychiatric hospital for traveling by car with the corpse of his beloved, recalling simultaneously three different lives: one from the past, another from nowadays and another one from an distopic future.

Pedro travels for the first time in one of the vans leading a group of workers to France. While, for the others, this is another work trip, each kilometer brings Pedro closer to a place that seduces him: the colossal mountains of the Alps.

In the mid-1980s, during a summer day, Rui Carlos and his friends Maranau and Tomané enjoy their free time in the neighborhood, between football matches and playful games. Rui Carlos repairs his worn-out shoes and heads out to borrow a valuable football from their neighbor, Dona Olinda, who daily entrusts it to him. As the teams are chosen and the game begins, typical neighborhood interruptions ensue: a visit from Mascote the dog, a break for lunch, and spontaneous games. But when the ball gets punctured, Rui Carlos is left to face responsibility and the realities of growing up.

In the hot month of August, Alice and her siblings go to their grandmother’s summer house. As the days go by, the house becomes a hive of slow straying bodies, as Alice becomes more and more engrained in her grandmother’s colonial past.

Thousands of workers take the ferry across Lisbon’s Tagus River every day. They’re commuters just like those you see everywhere in buses, trains and subways. In the ceaseless flow of humanity they disappear anonymously into the crowd. This film is Gonçalo Pina’s cinematic tribute to these “invisibles.”

During a summer vacation, a young couple deals with an unexpected pregnancy.

In 1872, the Emperor of Brazil, Pedro II, travels to Porto and stays at the Grand Hotel du Louvre, property of Maria Henriqueta de Mello Lemos e Alvelos. Today, the attempt to make a film about this episode becomes an invocation. Maria Henriqueta is with us. Memories, sounds and sensations take over the screen.