Isabel Machado

A path for tourists on their way to the Castle of São Jorge, the Pátio Dom Fradique was once a popular courtyard where around sixty families used to live.Today, ruins of their houses are the unique remains.There, the erased memories of the old city history and the frenzy of the new Lisbon give way to a contemporary urban tale.

After the Carnation Revolution the peasants in the Alentejo region occupied the huge proprieties where they were once submitted to the power of their masters. The protagonists of this film, resistants of this struggle, tell their story to the youngsters of today, in their own words.

Olivia Davis escapes her abuser with the help of a kind stranger, but his intentions are not yet clear to her. She must figure out the situation and escape her nightmare. ...Has she possibly jumped "From the Frying Pan and into The Fire"?

Bound by a silent pact, five students make a secret trip to the country for what seems to be an initiation ceremony. In threatening landscapes and abandoned ruins, they submit to the strange rituals of their leader, the Dux.

We went on discovering the story of princess Wakasa who fall in love with Fernão Mendes Pinto and was exchanged for a gun's secret.

No synopsis available yet.

A path for tourists on their way to the Castle of São Jorge, the Pátio Dom Fradique was once a popular courtyard where around sixty families used to live.Today, ruins of their houses are the unique remains.There, the erased memories of the old city history and the frenzy of the new Lisbon give way to a contemporary urban tale.

After the Carnation Revolution the peasants in the Alentejo region occupied the huge proprieties where they were once submitted to the power of their masters. The protagonists of this film, resistants of this struggle, tell their story to the youngsters of today, in their own words.

Olivia Davis escapes her abuser with the help of a kind stranger, but his intentions are not yet clear to her. She must figure out the situation and escape her nightmare. ...Has she possibly jumped "From the Frying Pan and into The Fire"?

Bound by a silent pact, five students make a secret trip to the country for what seems to be an initiation ceremony. In threatening landscapes and abandoned ruins, they submit to the strange rituals of their leader, the Dux.

We went on discovering the story of princess Wakasa who fall in love with Fernão Mendes Pinto and was exchanged for a gun's secret.

No synopsis available yet.

A nun is called upon to adopt her 15-year-old nephew, and as a consequence religious, familial and sensual love become entangled.

This film dives into a new world of possibilities, from the diversity of emotions tcreated by this one man alone in this house to his behavior and transformation on the world that he is creating.

This documentary follows a 70 years old, Angolan nurse on a nearly impossible humanitarian mission into her home country. In a southern region that was specially affected by the long lasting, recent civil war, the local hospital has to be restructured. At this place where accidental death, poverty and lack of hygiene continue to be a part of people's daily life, the subversive presence of mystical forces seem to reinvent the meaning of life.

Theatre is life, as movement is life. In "Truth or Dare?", Sofia Marques sets off in search of her friend and actor Luis Miguel Cintra; and Cintra is in search of himself, both excavating the matter and memory of theatre, the matter and memory of life. At home surrounded by statuary and by his Porto, by the sea and in Spain where he was born, on a stage of light and shadow, in the films of Manoel de Oliveira or in the poems of Ruy Belo.

At 30, Jiro embarked on a year-long trip taking in the Soviet Union, North Africa, Europe, and the United States. Nearly half a century later, his daughter makes use of various memorabilia to take a step back in time and explore how such adventures have shaped the man’s take on the modern world.

Algarve, late 90s. Following the death of her grandmother, Milene - a strong young woman full of life despite a slight mental handicap - divides her life between her family of notables and a Cape Verdean family that keeps her going, whom she met when her grandmother died. The wind that whistles in the cranes plunges us into the world of two families against the backdrop of Portugal's recent past.

Georges Bizet's famous opera Carmen tells the story of the eponymous Gypsy woman, depicted as being impulsive and with an eye on smuggling. Taking this perpetuated stereotype into account, we visit a group of Spanish gypsy women who are claiming their own space.

A man, a child, two wars, a river, a tree. A man and a child meet under a tree on a river bank, sharing the same memory and a secret. They find in each other the serenity, the silence and the time they lost in the flowing water of the river.

Three friends search for a magic lake that mysteriously appeared in South Tunisia. While some people think it could be a curse, others believe that this appearance exists because of local practices and occult rituals. People search for it, seeking the prophetic qualities it is said to possess. Between tales, strange visions and possession, we get through a region that is still searching for something more.

Roberto is one of those men to whom simulation has become the greatest art. He is an unmoved, inscrutable, mysterious man. But the truth is that Robert feels an intimate, deep tedium. The boredom of those who have already exhausted all the pleasures of life. The only thing still surprising him is the fact that nothing surprises him anymore. One evening he has an overwhelming encounter with a woman. For his own bewilderment, he discovers the sublime horrors in which the woman has sank.

Other Letters or The Invented Love deals with the passionate book New Portuguese Letters, a collective work written by the authors known as the Three Marias in the 70s, as a pretext for a short cinematographic inventory about relationships and affection between people today and always.

On the riverside quay of the enormous container port of Lisbon two old decaying sky-blue painted buildings are located directly opposite to each other. One is closed and abandoned, the other inhabited by the two bright and inquisitive girls Ana and Matilde. Watching the closed building every single day and night the sisters get more and more suspicious. Strange phenomenons and movements behind the thick blue walls increase their curiosity. How is possible what their children`s eyes are witnessing? Who are those mysterious neighbours? How to discover old house`s secret?

This inward portrait of young Vania follows her from Bulgaria to Portugal and Spain and back home. Vania wishes a better life searching her personal independence and identity. She experiences illegality, isolation and exploitation while she tries to find answers for life's major decisions. This is a film about emigration from a feminine point of view. It tells us the hopes and fears of a common person and consists in reflection about everyday life's reality. It's about growing up and putting off life ... while hopping that, one day, the utopia of Europe will actually happen.

Adaptation by the director Inês Oliveira from the traditional Portuguese tale «O Sapo e a Rapariga». The laundry room is closed and a young woman (Rita Cabaço) has to learn how to wash clothes by hand with the wise Deolinda (Isabel Ruth), who tells her a strange story of enchantment.

Pedro travels for the first time in one of the vans leading a group of workers to France. While, for the others, this is another work trip, each kilometer brings Pedro closer to a place that seduces him: the colossal mountains of the Alps.

No synopsis available yet.

In Sarajevo, in a cinema’s projection booth, lives Sena; a woman who in daily solitude repeats the projection of the few Yugoslavian films of which there are copies. Through a combination of silence, the everyday gestures of this woman and the films that are projected from her living room, comes a film built like a day in Sena’s life. Through the films that Sena projects, we are taken on a journey in both collective and personal memory. The film offers a portrait of intimacy crossed with a history witnessed by cinema; a history which Sena has conserved.

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 preserve it until their last breaths.

Marta and Jorge have been a couple for seven years. All their friends think they are living a perfect romance. Too perfect, perhaps, for the despair of all: Bruno, who is much younger than Marta but madly in love with her; Lígia, who is Bruno's sister and Marta's best friend and would love to see her brother happy; Carlos, Jorge's friend, who maintains a superficial romance with Lígia while secretly in love with Marta; and for Jorge himself, who is afraid this idyllic romance will imprison him and, convinced that his love and his lover's desire to marry will take away his freedom, decides to show her the way into Carlos arms.

Cinema and affections from life in images and what goes on outside the frame. 'Snapshots' of shootings and the present-day memory of directors, actors and technicians.

Eden's Ark is a journey through the dramatic, chaotic, precarious world of botany and film preservation. A journey in danger and poetry, across the ice and the tropics, following adventurers and preservers, and confronting what we lose and save.

A reflective film essay, a machine of though, presented in tableau-form, composed by digital postcards on video format. Inspired by Donna Haraway the film is about a future of response-ability to inhabit the n-dimensional niche space called Earth or Terrapolis. We look for “real stories that are also speculative fabulations and speculative realisms. (…) stories in which multispecies players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation.”

Certain moments seem to stretch time differently, lingering in our minds longer than others do. They can be a positive memory, of a peaceful afternoon on the beach, or a negative one, like the helplessness that comes with a moment of uncertainty. In a house with vestiges of someone moving (leaving or arriving?), two women attempt a dialog filled with absences, trying to decipher the past and the future. Enigmatic, somewhere between an illusion and a daydream, time here seems suspended, lulled by silences and shadows.

We don`t know much about the future world where people need to visit 'Kinotels'. But we know that going to the cinema has radically changed. It has become a computer directed kind of intimate ritual during which people enter another reality and switch personality. This is the short story of aman and a woman who visit a Kinotel.

Several Portuguese creators occupy the director's chair in this collective short film shot during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown in an unfolding of personal perspectives.