Dina Félix Costa

Daniel had a plan, a sort of journal of the future, written in a notebook. Sometimes he went back to rectify small things, but still, life seemed pretty easy and happiness too. But, all of a sudden, everything changed for the worse: Portugal collapsed and Daniel lost his job. He couldn't afford to pay the mortgage for his house any more. His wife, also unemployed, left with his children, searching for better opportunities.

Emilia is a writer, living in Lisbon in the year 1959. She is the “Damsel Warrior”, a fictional woman composed from the literary universes of Maria Judite de Carvalho and Irene Lisboa, writers of the city and the characters that inhabit it.

We stare at mirrors as if 'image' was a weapon of self-defense. At night, I hide in actors' dressing rooms for a working class experience. By day, I face an old theatre being razed to the ground, making way for a parking lot. Graffitis have curtains, the nose cap of an umbrella arises from a mount of sand. Oh, Happy Days! No need to stage anything! The bulldozer is a dinosaur whose teeth and gracious neck swings by a EU flag. In the boxes, we await the audience. Sometimes, nobody comes. Lost in a symbolic show of reality, I can only watch the world's end because all the endangered species perform and a reflecting labyrinth of life stories breaks through the glass of the Economic Eating Machine. Even when the sky is falling, theatre will always happen. So, choose the right place.

In early 1985, the writer Nuno Bragança hands his friend Carlos Antunes a 13 question’s questionnaire; 13 sheets of graph paper, of which he offered the recto-verso of each for his friend to answer. The questions were about Carlos Antunes’ personal and political career, with a special interest in his involvement in the Revolutionary Brigades and the armed struggle against the dictatorship that led to his arrest in 1978. The untimely death of the writer, in the same year, left the questionnaire unanswered and some uncertainty as to its purpose. After almost 30 years, the director asks Carlos Antunes to answer the 13 questions and to reconstruct the achievements, illusions and sorrows of the Revolutionary Brigades in Portugal, in the years surrounding the Carnations’ Revolution in 1974.

One day, a woman appeared at the Vigilatório de Enfermidades Comuns e Ordinárias (Common and Ordinary Illnesses Clinic) complaining of itching. A strange mold had grown on her back...