Susana Nobre

Directing

Susana Nobre

Lisbon, Portugal

She was born in Lisbon in 1974. In 1998 she received a B.A. in Communication Sciences from Lisbon’s Nova University. She directed the documentaries “Active Life” (2013) and “O Que Pode Um Rosto” (2003), as well as the short films “Trials, Exorcisms” (2015), “Lisbon-Province” (2010), and “Estados da Matéria” (2006) Her films have been shown in the following festivals: Cannes (Directors’ Fortnight), Rotterdam, Angers, Vila do Conde, Rio de Janeiro, Vienna, Montevideo, among others. Since 2006 she has been a member of the production company Terratreme (former Raiva), where she has worked as an executive producer in many projects.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

Lisbon-Province poster
5.0

A nurse takes care of a patient in her house. Maria do Céu has been a nurse for more than forty years, working at an old Hospital in Lisbon. She was sixteen, when she arrived to Lisbon, coming from a small village in Alentejo. At the Hospital, she reads the file of an old patient who was also her friend. The file is then closed. Maria do Céu returns to her village, where she sings at the people’s house choir.

Lisbon-Province

2010

Ascension poster
7.0

At dawn, a group of peasants tries to rescue the body of a young man from the inside of a well. Women veil their faces in silence while men endure the situation. In the centre of it all, a mother awaits her son's body. How can life cease to be when in nature there is an enduring renewal?

Ascension

2016

Vida Activa poster
NR

New Opportunities were a portuguese education program with a focus on the academic certification of adults who left school early. Applicants will improve their academic degree from the re-elaboration and re-interpretation of his "life experience." These processes motivated workers to reflect on their working conditions, their training, their roots, producing a plurality of views about the school, emigration, the rural world and the universe of employment. Having its protagonists stories as a starting point, the film approches into a reflection about work in the contemporay world. This film was produced over four years work by the film director in a New Opportunities Centre.

Vida Activa

2014

Vida Activa poster
NR

New Opportunities were a portuguese education program with a focus on the academic certification of adults who left school early. Applicants will improve their academic degree from the re-elaboration and re-interpretation of his "life experience." These processes motivated workers to reflect on their working conditions, their training, their roots, producing a plurality of views about the school, emigration, the rural world and the universe of employment. Having its protagonists stories as a starting point, the film approches into a reflection about work in the contemporay world. This film was produced over four years work by the film director in a New Opportunities Centre.

Vida Activa

2014

It Would Have Been Simple poster
5.0

They thought life would be simple. All material problems would be overcome. Every morning it would be good to have breakfast together, the table laid. It would be the beginning of a long day at work. The daily ritual of a house inhabited by a mother and the two-year-old daughter. The automatism of the gestures of material life and its suspension in small events.

It Would Have Been Simple

2005

Cidade Rabat poster
5.0

When her mother dies, 40-year-old Helena now has time for herself after years of taking care of her family. She works at a film production company, dances boisterously, gets drunk. A quiet film about letting go morphs into a coming of middle age story.

Cidade Rabat

2024

Cidade Rabat poster
5.0

When her mother dies, 40-year-old Helena now has time for herself after years of taking care of her family. She works at a film production company, dances boisterously, gets drunk. A quiet film about letting go morphs into a coming of middle age story.

Cidade Rabat

2024

Suzanne Daveau poster
NR

This documentary portrait covers all the themes of Daveau’s rich life: from her field research and private life to feminism and the influence of the modern age on family relationships and science. Her passionate life is examined in detail in an inexhaustible series of stunning archival photos and home videos recorded by Daveau, and in voice-over she speaks openly, extensively and full of wonder about life and the world around her.

Suzanne Daveau

2019

No artwork available
NR

Summer late afternoon in a Lisbon suburb. The concerns and expectations of a group of friends as they shift to a new stage of their lives.

Season

2007

April Tune poster
6.5

Early Spring. A sonata, a train, a letter. Between his work as a flute teacher and the rituals of mourning the early death of his wife, Samuel faces a dilemma after a visit from his brother.

April Tune

2025

No artwork available
NR

(within the project URB) CIDADE is a TV series that takes place in the diverse, urbanistically chaotic and multicultural periphery of Lisbon. Each episode has for landscape and dramatic background the everyday-life in the social housing neighborhoods and shanty towns of Lisbon. It explores the infinite possibilities of narratives and characters generated by the daily confrontation of the normal life of the city with several layers of cultural heritages and lifestyles, brought by different waves of migration. A network of interconnected characters, families and ties makes the narrative to evolve and illustrates the cultural, artistic, social and economic explosion that we are about to live in here.

Cidade

2017

Astrakan 79 poster
NR

1979. Flicking through pictures from a Soviet magazine, 15-year-old Martim dreams of building a new society. His radical communist parents send him to study at Astrakan for one year. In her new film, Catarina Mourão captures with tremendous precision the moment a middle-aged man passes his story on to his son, thus shedding the taboo of his ineffable experience.

Astrakan 79

2024

The Nothing Factory poster
6.0

One night, a group of workers realises that the administration is stealing machines and raw materials from their own factory. As they organize to survey the equipment and block the relocation of production, they are forced to stand at their posts with no work to do, as a form of retaliation, while negotiations over general lay-offs take place. The pressure leads to a breakdown of the workers along with the world around them.

The Nothing Factory

2017

High Cities of Bone poster
6.3

Karlon, born in Pedreira dos Húngaros (a slum in the outskirts of Lisbon) and a pioneer of Cape Verdean creole rap, runs away from the housing project to which he had been relocated.

High Cities of Bone

2017

Campo poster
5.0

“Campo de Marte” (The Field of Mars) was in the ancient times Rome’s training arena for war. At the outskirts of Lisbon, “Campo” hosts today Europe’s largest military base. In this place military troops train fictional missions, astronomy aficionados observe the stars and a boy plays the piano for the wild deers lurking in the dark.

Campo

2018

Lisbon Beat poster
NR

A journey through Lisbon’s suburbs through the lives of a handful of musicians establishing their place to exist in a city of complex identity struggles. Different generations and backgrounds meet, Angola to São Tome, Cabo Verde and Guine Bissau represented by old musicians and young producers.

Lisbon Beat

2019

Clandestina poster
NR

In order to reflect upon current practices of political dissent, we delve into the past and follow the experiences of a young artist. Invited to go underground in Portugal, during the second half of the 20th century, Margarida Tengarrinha played an important role in anti-fascist resistance, becoming a forger out of political activism. Given the anachronism, Clandestina is like a letter to a time yet to come, a premonition of the tragic possibility of History repeating itself.

Clandestina

2024

Destiny Deluxe poster
7.0

Through a city that carries the weight of broken expectations and tough absencies, we follow the day of three young adults. César who got into a photoshoot by accident, Chloé who hopes to find a place to do her own work, and Helena who is back in her town for some days, only to find the living shadow of a loss.

Destiny Deluxe

2019

Shimmering Bodies poster
NR

The afternoon Jorge asks Mariana over for a weekend at his house in Leiria, she starts to see him in a whole new light. Unsure of her friend’s intentions, Mariana accepts his unexpected and baffling invitation.

Shimmering Bodies

2023

Waterland Song poster
NR

David, wood-mask sculptor, and Adélia, ancient songs connoisseur, are the characters of this movie set in Trás-os-Montes, north-east of Portugal. They testify the neglect condition of this land, where survive traces of a prehistoric ocean.

Waterland Song

2009

Reynard poster
NR

Cunning and slender, harassed and on the run, Reynard is a metaphor of a never ending obsession with each breath, each gesture, each thought. Marta seeks in the emptiness of her body a way to arrive to her inner essence, in an abstract search of a free spirit that might end in her own enclosure.

Reynard

2019

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

O que pode um rosto

2003

Trials, Exorcisms poster
NR

In Alhambra, between the mountains and the river, a train runs through the village. Oscar, forty-eight years, has worked for the last twenty-fifth years in the same factory, and finds himself awaiting for the resolution of the court on the application of the insolvency of the factory where he worked. With the suspended production and the unpaid wages, Oscar and his colleagues continue to appear daily to work hoping that they can keep their jobs.

Trials, Exorcisms

2015

Trials, Exorcisms poster
NR

In Alhambra, between the mountains and the river, a train runs through the village. Oscar, forty-eight years, has worked for the last twenty-fifth years in the same factory, and finds himself awaiting for the resolution of the court on the application of the insolvency of the factory where he worked. With the suspended production and the unpaid wages, Oscar and his colleagues continue to appear daily to work hoping that they can keep their jobs.

Trials, Exorcisms

2015