Tall Stories

12-year-old Miguel is punished because he has not done his homework properly: he must stay at his aunt's inn for holidays. First bored, then a friendship begins between him and other inn's regular holiday-makers, like maid Luisa or fisherman João. But doctor Fernando's arrival is going to overwhelm the place's peaceful life and to change Miguel's mind.

Island of Loves

This film depicts the life of the 19th-century Portuguese writer Wenceslau De Moraes by means of nine ancient ballads from China. The writer married a Chinese woman after he left his wife and family to go live in Macao. Later, he moved to Japan where he fell in love with a Japanese woman, staying in Japan for the rest of his life. Mixed in with the career and loves of Moraes is the history of Portugal at home and in its colonies.

Day of Despair

Portrait of the last days of the life of Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco.

Gebo and the Shadow

Despite his age and general weariness, Gebo keeps on working as an accountant to provide for his family. He lives with his wife, Doroteia, and his daughter-in-law, Sofia, but it is the absence of João, son and husband, that worries them.Gebo seems to be hiding something, especially to Doroteia, who is anxiously waiting to see her son again. Sofia is also waiting for her husband to come home, and yet she fears him. All of a sudden, João arrives and everything changes.

Correspondences

Jorge de Sena was forced to leave his country. First he moved to Brazil, and later to the USA. He never returned to Portugal. During his 20-year-long exile, he kept an epistolary correspondence with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. These letters are a testimony of the profound friendship between the two poets, letters of longing and of desire to “fill years of distance with hours of conversation”. Through excerpts and verses, a dialog is established, revealing their divergent opinions but mostly their strong bond, and their efforts to prese...

Where the Sun Beats

Laura lives in the country with her considerably older husband. When Nuno, her brother who study in Lisbon, pays a visit, he realizes that his sister does not have a happy life. He initiates a friendship with a worker on the farm. The circumstances turn Laura and Nuno against each other... Portrays the repressed sexuality and homosexual desire in a rural setting and elliptically and delicately the small farming community that serves as the backdrop for the impossible relationships pursued by Laura and her brother.

Carlos de Oliveira: Upon the Left Side

Carlos Oliveira's literary universe is re-enacted in a studio using the writer’s personal objects and manuscripts, and with the help of Luis Miguel Cintra and Fernando Lopes. Shot with the purpose to document his work in the same way Carlos de Oliveira documented his hometown in Gândara, the film uses all the creative liberty that new digital technology allows in order to recreate the visual and sound records that were also present in the writer and poet’s own work.

Días color naranja

Ephemeral loves, days of summer freedom and the drift across Europe

Second Hand

Jorge is a loner and a writer of popular books. At night, he looks through other people's windows and thinks that they are truly happy.

Anteroom

Using video assist recorded images, Antecâmara is about the “act” of shooting, the physical reality and ritual energy of two film crews during the preparation for a shot. The first video assist rule is that the image one sees in it has to be more interesting than what one sees outside. Nothing is left to chance. It helps to preview the shot, organise space, arrange the scenes, move the actors and light the set. And it provides it all with a meaning depending on how the camera is used. It is the space-time before the shot, where it is sketched.

Villa Mauresque

Vincent, a young Swiss, is upset by his meeting with the city of Lisbon. He will meet two persons: a prostitute of high flight and a great writer fallen and suicidal.

Vertiges

In a specialized, hermetic drama about love won and lost, not necessarily by the same individuals, novice director Christine Laurent has focused on the backstage melodramas of an opera company. The conductor for an upcoming performance of the Marriage of Figaro has his mind and heart on other matters -- an entrancing diva who keeps him enraptured with her presence and voice. In the meantime, he finds fault with his cast members who cannot, of course, measure up to the woman of his dreams. As singers encounter one problem or another, it is cl...

The Fifth Empire

Manoel de Oliveira directs José Régio's historical epic of religious and political power struggles. King Sebastião plans to make Portugal the world's Fifth Empire.