Directing

Saguenail

Born 1955-05-07 · Paris, France

Saguenail - Serge Abramovici (born May 7, 1955) After graduated with a degree in Modern Languages and Literature, he came to Portugal in 1975 to see the Revolution from the inside. Here he met Regina Guimarães, who would become his companion and accomplice, both in art and in life. He returned to Paris where he worked as a primary school teacher until he settled in Porto for good in 1980. With Regina Guimarães, he founded the production company Hélastre (which, however, would only come into legal existence in 1996). Here he began his cinematographic work in 1980. In 1984, he was part of the team that launched the film magazine 'A Grande Ilusão' (published by the Cineclube do Norte), where he developed a critical activity.

Acting credits

Massa Mãe poster
NR

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

Massa Mãe

2026

Life Lesson poster
7.0

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."

Life Lesson

1995

River of Gold poster
7.1

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.

River of Gold

1999

No artwork available
NR

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

La Panne des Sens - Cahier d'un retour à la Martinique

2014

Behind the camera

Mau Dia poster
NR

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…

Mau Dia

2006

Mau Dia poster
NR

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…

Mau Dia

2006

No artwork available
NR

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.

Cineclube

2021

The Life of Mirrors poster
NR

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 Life of Mirrors

2025

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Pas Perdus

2008

Má Sina poster
NR

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.

Má Sina

1996

Má Sina poster
NR

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.

Má Sina

1996

Dentro poster
NR

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.

Dentro

2001

No artwork available
NR

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.

Antes de amanhã

2001

Non Scriptus Manet poster
NR

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...

Non Scriptus Manet

2026

Non Scriptus Manet poster
NR

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...

Non Scriptus Manet

2026

Non Scriptus Manet poster
NR

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...

Non Scriptus Manet

2026

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

O Cemitério

2019

No artwork available
NR

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.

Acentuado Arrefecimento Nocturno

2013

Alma Depenada poster
NR

Based on biographical data that refer to, and transform, the experiences, aspirations, memories, etc. of the performer, Alma Depenada stages the need to dialogue with the double(s), whose corollary is, paradoxically, to harass them, chase them away, and ultimately kill them.

Alma Depenada

2018

Antónia poster
NR

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.

Antónia

2007

No artwork available
NR

Ateliers Ângelo films the artist's Ângelo de Sousa workspaces shortly after his death. Its absence is now an immense presence and impossible to represent.

Ateliers Ângelo

2011

Decrescente poster
NR

We're at war. Every day, bombs explode. Everywhere. The terrorist attack is unstoppable. The enemy is invisible. And yet as weapons they are alike. There are common interests. And the common denominator is financial. The alliance game is constantly traded and modified on the world chessboard. The shares do not follow the course of the shares on the Stock Exchange. There are victims but the damages are all collateral. It is necessary to reconstruct a geography as a History is rewritten. And I think every window is a mirror, every image a reflection. Eight symbolic characters that represent metaphorically some of the forces that dominate the contemporary world: USA, Russia, Europe, Third World; Major sectors: Armament, Energy Resources, Finance, Bureaucracy; Ideological Oppositions: Traditionalist Past, Youth Revolted, Cynical Opportunism, Conformist Disenchantment - playing a game of verbal chess for a moment may decide the near future.

Decrescente

2016

Amour en latin poster
10.0

In an enclosed space of a café for an entire night, a set of characters try to verbalize their thirst for love and their fear that love will overwhelm them.

Amour en latin

1989

Amour en latin poster
10.0

In an enclosed space of a café for an entire night, a set of characters try to verbalize their thirst for love and their fear that love will overwhelm them.

Amour en latin

1989

No artwork available
NR

AUTREFOIS illustrates, disillustrates and counter-illustrates a monologue by Charles Crosby - narrated by Gilles Mayoux with a jazz background of Bertrand Bishop and Claude Santelli - in which all modes of existence are identified with the harms of progress.

Autrefois

1969

No artwork available
NR

On leaving university, what do students do with their acquired baggage? Is it for them to find a job that meets their expectations? And how do they see the university once the study cycle they have completed there?

A Bagagem

2006

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Revolver

1974

History with no capital letter poster
NR

Portrait of a time and a country through the plotless story of an unassuming couple, questioning seeming antagonisms that conceal mysterious kinships, and highlighting an intrinsic contradiction of cinema: while fabricating images, film language creates objects that are deeply different from the original models

History with no capital letter

2019