Regina Guimarães

To attain knowledge, man and woman had to be willing to give up their innocence," says Boris Lehman. Life Lesson is a poetic and philosophic reflection on the theme of paradise lost. Some fifty persons illustrate the planet's convulsions and the world's vacillations. Trying to communicate, to commune with the invisible, they cry out, sing out, give out messages, each in their own way, in their own state of solitude. These are like multiple echoes that resemble waves in the water or stars in the sky. " Behind these images and sounds that have been stifled by today's society, Lehman hunts for noises, cries, songs, messages that go astray. He says that if we look at the invisible we may hear the words. He invites us to look beyond the appearances of social life and to vibrate in tune with life's polyphony that is all around us."

Maria and Matías feel life is slipping through their fingers, and turn to birds, real and imagined, in a search for meaning and connection.

Thirty-something Vítor still lives with his mother, Fátima, in his grandmother Júlia’s apartment. Fátima is a hairdresser with a quiet disposition who, at night, fantasises about the policeman who has just moved in next door. By day, Vítor is a lowly employee on a TV show. But at night, he dons his neighbour’s uniform to win the favour and satisfy the desires of a boy he’s met online. In her retirement home, Júlia is unable to sleep at night and has long forgotten what drugs she is meant to be taking. She misses her dead husband, who manifests himself in the body of a living friend, and gets involved in her daily activities. Through these characters, Diogo Costa Amarante constructs a fascinating portrait of lives lived while desires remain unrealised.

On a farm in rural Brazil in the 18th century, a new overseer arrives. He falls in love with one of the enslaved women, Mestiça, beloved by all the men. When a pair of silver earrings disappears from the farm and the overseer orders the leader of the enslaved women arrested, Mestiça decides to take revenge.

'A Távola de Rocha' enables us to enter Paulo Rocha’s universe, to gather memories and find, within his personal and professional relationships, a key to decipher some of the unknown symbols and allusions contained in his films.

Shot in Martinique, with the evocation of several texts, namely by Aimé Césaire.

No synopsis available yet.

Filmed mainly in Ljubljana, the film tells the story of the beautiful Urska, whom the river continuously brings back to life.

“A collection of self-portraits captured over more than ten years. Between the moment I was given my first (and modest) camera and the summer of 2016, there are grandchildren learning to swim and shoals of shipwrecked people in the Mediterranean…” – R.G.

No synopsis available yet.

From Jacques Prévert's poem “Petit déjeuner du matin”, Mau Dia experiences a dilation of the time in which the banality hides the lived drama. All elements are decomposed and then rebuilt - painted walls, orchestrated rain, spoiled actions, depicted or sung…

1920s. Vitalino, a small farmer from São Vicente sees his father die of the epidemic which decimated the country. Some years later, of all the brothers, Vitalino is the strongest and takes his father’s place in the house. But the village is too small for his aspirations and he decides to head to Brazil, leaving his sisters in charge of the household. In parallel with Vitalino’s story, If I Were a Thief… I’d Steal portrays the world of Paulo Rocha rummaging through his films and ghosts over the years.

C and B are twin cats who live in a rundown harbour town, inhabited by downtrodden birds who, under the yoke of an oppressive and silencing power, have lost the ability to sing or fly. C is a restless dreamer and B is a pragmatic thinker, but both are determined to change their destiny and save the town. Dom Fradique unravels the adventures of these twin cats who, although choosing distinct paths, embody the transformation of both the place they inhabit as well as their own selves, echoing present day themes that unsettle younger generations and the challenges they face, on a social, ecological and political level. What they discover will change them, their lives, and their town forever.

With the sea and urban Algarve as the backdrop, we follow a complete life cycle of a special shellfish called percebes, the goose barnacle.

Discussing cinema during a pandemic – a revisit to an online film club, after thirty post-viewing discussion sessions that took place during the first lockdown.

Everything came up with this defiant idea: what if a director followed the first person to come through the door of his house? Luís Vieira Campos did this and found Geni, a strong woman who dreamt of opening her own store at Centro Comercial de Cedofeita, a mythical place of Porto. Between advances and retreats, between the increasing opening of the director and his character, the film reveals the unique portrait of a woman, a neighbourhood - Cedofeita - and the improbable relationships we establish when we least expect it. Luís Vieira Campos proves, with Geni, that cinema is also the "neighbourhood" and its people.

In an empty theatre, a woman is watching an American film - "Ma's Sin" - which tells the weird revenge story of a middle-aged wife, driven mad by jealousy and a deep feer of dying. During the screening, the viewer's fantasies embodied in male characters harass her. Thus she will live the double adventure of the projected motion picture and of her own mental film. But as the lights turn on, she leaves the theatre, apparently unaffected.

Vanitas is the new feature film by veteran Portuguese director Paulo Rocha. With a script by Regina Guimarães, the film brings together actresses Isabel Ruth and Joana Bárcia – no strangers to this director's world – in a story about a depressed fashion designer who falls in love with the daughter of one her tailors.

From Manet's painting – Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe – two women and two men slip from the timelessness of the museum into our present day. They have come to picnic and enjoy a pleasant swim in the river. The men approach them and, with little attempt to conceal their aggressive libidinous intentions, threaten the happiness of the moment, the serenity of the place, and the integrity of the bathers. This fragment of Eden and everything around it is inhabited by a naturalized social violence...

The Life of Mirrors is one of the sections of the exhibition Luis Miguel Cintra - Small Theatre of the World. A commission by Serralves Foundation to Regina Guimarães and Saguenail, and constructed after an unpublished interview with Luis Miguel Cintra, this film is the result of a long and painstaking exercise of selecting and editing excerpts from films by Manoel de Oliveira in which Cintra participates as an actor. In this way, The Life of Mirrors is a reflective, retrospective essay film, which opens the Carte Blanche, thus establishing a gateway to Luis Miguel Cintra's cinematographic and cinephile career.

The original family is expelled from Eden and forced to face the hardships of existence. However, each of its members sees the world differently. Tensions, jealousy, and feelings of guilt lead Adam, Eve, and Cain to gang up against Abel, forcing him to make the first sacrifice.

A film motivated by anger at the frivolity with which sex is treated in cinema. On the aquarium screen, an attempt is made to materialize thought.

The Mediateca Onshore in Malafo, a village in Guinea-Bissau, is an archive and a club for agropoetic practices. As Amílcar Cabral talks feminism on tape, the directors speak in the mangroves about the contradictions of depicting the community.

Carolina, an aging local grande dame who works at a crossing point on the titular river, marries another late-in-life character, the dredging-boat operator Antonio. Not long after their union, she becomes intensely jealous of Antonio's fondness for their winsome goddaughter, Joana, and insinuates herself into a relationship brewing between Joana and a mystical gypsy gold salesman. Soon, tempers are flaring, mystical secrets are being revealed and death is hovering over the central characters.

"Wood was uninterruptedly burning in the home, of that centrifugal place whose actors still offered new worlds to the world born from the sweat of their brows and the clandestine sap of their dreams." Regina Guimarães

Set in the Lisbon during the festivities of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lovers and the old town. The story is about Cato, a nationalist politician who is charismatic and unscrupulous. He obsessively pursues Silvia, a mystical and mysterious young transvestite whom he meets at the festival. When Silvia runs into Vicente, a policeman who arrests transvestites and threatens them, Silvia must look towards blackmail to save herself. Compromising photos of Cato start to emerge among opposition parties and he must do all in his power to save his political career.

Porto 2001 project, made in the prison of Paços de Ferreira. Nuno Cardoso, the play director, develops this work with the prisoners during the time period of one year. Documentation of the process: conversations with the prisoners in the context of the process of artistic creation and the theater project. Interviews and testimonials with various people who cross their experiences, their view of life and their life behind bars, with the development of the play.

A journey through the Portuguese Ongoing Revolutionary Process

An altarpiece and a portrait, whose composition obeys the digressions and ramblings of a handful of people, around their intimate relationship with God.

An act of passion, filmed in a church turned into a bar, on Easter 2003, and starring as many actors as the days of the year… Taking the sacred painting as a reference, the film questions the human condition: letting oneself die like Christ or betray scientifically like Peter?

An act of passion, filmed in a church turned into a bar, on Easter 2003, and starring as many actors as the days of the year… Taking the sacred painting as a reference, the film questions the human condition: letting oneself die like Christ or betray scientifically like Peter?

Antónia didn't play with dolls, nor did she learn to read and write at the age when children go to school and don't usually sell their labor power. She experienced the harsh social inequalities of Salazarism. Used to toiling from sun up to sun down, work is still her "sport" today. She regrets that those who miss the dictatorship are not forced to experience in the flesh what fascism was like... She tells us all this while her hands prepare the dough for the Easter cakes, scented with aniseed, with the zeal of a master.

Shot in Martinique, with the evocation of several texts, namely by Aimé Césaire.

Shot in Martinique, with the evocation of several texts, namely by Aimé Césaire.