Trapos e Companhia

Ana Catarina returns from Brazil with her father and her nanny to marry a man she doesn't know and doesn't like. A terrible coincidence happens when, on the same day, the young woman becomes a widow and an orphan, a fact that leaves her heir to an incalculable fortune and coveted by all the aristocrats in the region.

For a 13-year-old boy like Filipe, the prospect of a summer vacation in the Azores with his father is like a dream come true. But dreams are sometimes just a way to avoid facing reality.

Cape Verde, 1964. At the feet of a mighty volcano, the traditional Cape Verdean society is undergoing a steady change. The old land-owning aristocracy is disintegrating. A class of "mulattos" begins to emerge, with a trade-based financial power that threatens the landlords. A new identity arises, a mix of old and new, of African and Portuguese culture, sensual and dynamic. The songs of Cesária Évora follow this inevitable transformation. From the novel by Henrique Teixeira de Sousa.

“The Two Brothers” is based on a true story. André, a Cape Verdean migrant in Lisbon, receives a letter from his father telling him that his younger brother João has had an affair with André’s wife and demanding his return to recover the family’s honour. His father and the entire village pressure him into killing his brother, his friend. A story of conflict between current laws and an unwritten, ancient law – that might be more powerful…

The film is liberally inspired by the period when Eça de Queiroz was Portuguese Consul in Cuba, when still a Spanish colony. Eça de Queiroz struggles against local authorities in his defense of Chinese workers, brought to the sugar plantations by greedy middlemen and exploited as slaves. Two parallel stories unfold, that of a Chinese girl which Eça de Queiroz saves from the clutches of one of the island’s most powerful slave owners, and the other of a romance involving a young American woman on holidays in Havana.