Índia

Some of the chapters from Arabian Nights are adapted to a modern Portugal in this epic.

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.

Scheherazade narrates three more tales, supposedly selected from the 470th, 484th and 497th nights of her ordeal: “It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport himself to escape the Guard while dreaming of prostitutes and partridges. A wounded cow will reminisce about a thousand-year-old olive tree while saying what she must say, which will sound none less than sad!

In the bucolic countryside of Brazil, Marcelo, an easygoing cowboy at a cattle farm lives for one passion: rodeos. One tragic incident affects him deeply. Little by little he overcomes the trauma and is ready to dream again.

Every night, in danger of being beheaded, Scheherazade tells King Shahryar unfinished tales to continue them the following night, hence defying his promise of murdering his new wives after their wedding night. Scheherazade tells King Shahryar her stories but these are not those in the book. As in the book, these stories are tragic and comical, with rich and poor, powerless and powerful people, filled with surprising and extraordinary events.

In the heart of Portugal, amid the mountains, the month of August is abuzz with people and activity...

Burma, 1917. Edward, a civil servant for the British Empire, jilts his lovestruck fiancée Molly the day she arrives to be married. As he flees into an unexpected odyssey across Asia, the free-spirited Molly-amused by his moves-follows in pursuit, embarking on a globe-trotting cat-and-mouse chase.

In which Scheherazade doubts that she will still be able to tell stories to please the King, given that what she has to tell weighs three thousand tonnes. She therefore escapes from the palace and travels the Kingdom in search of pleasure and enchantment. Her father, the Grand-Vizier, arranges to meet her at the Ferris wheel, and Scheherazade resumes her narration: “Auspicious King, in old shanty towns of Lisbon there was a community of bewitched men who, in all rigour and passion, dedicated themselves to teaching birds to sing…”. And seeing the morning break, Scheherazade fell silent.

Fragments of spaces, buildings and structures, memories and remains of past eras, places of work or leisure now inhabited by our memories alone, or really forgotten. Dead things or living proof of time, natural elements, and human predators themselves.

A journey through the real history and the tales of a region in southern Portugal and a portrait of the people who have lived there, weaving together accounts of rural workers and field notes of archaeologists, amateur footage and scientific drawings, legends, poems, and songs.

Francisco, behave! I Know it's your birthday, you are thirty now, it's carnival, you've dressed as a cowboy for the school party and you are surrounded by kids you hate. But that's no reason to be so annoying... Francisco, repeat after me: "Up to your 30s you have the face God has given you. After that, you get the face you deserve".

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.

João is an indolent young man, whose life is desperately empty. Day after day he goes through the motions of duplicating keys in his tiny shop concealed in the basement of an obsolete nearly deserted shopping center. Some day, he hopes, the lady of his heart will come and order the key that will unlock his heart. Against all expectation, the miracle happens...

Rita is fifteen and spends the summer between warm afternoons of teenage love and party nights with her friend Sara. From Portugal to the South Pacific, the pleasures of this routine will take a turn when the young girl visits the art show of a new neighbor in the local community.

A ten year-old boy faces up to the struggles of life in a summer camp. It’s not easy to be ignored by the girl of his heart or seeing his dormitory vandalised by adolescent thugs. Fortunately, in the forest, the wild haggis insists on remaining out of sight.

The panoramic shots are breathtaking: a majestic mountain landscape in winter, flat-roofed tin shacks cowering next to one other, women perched on steep slopes using primitive tools to break through pieces of rock. La Rinconada is situated over 5,000 meters high in the Peruvian Andes, on the edge of a gold mine. This 21st century El Dorado is an inhospitable place, where untold numbers of people live and work in the most precarious of conditions, hoping both for gold and a better life. Salomé Lamas has constructed a cinematic diptych to convey the extremity of this situation and the dimensions of its misery without having to resort to graphic images.