José Manuel Mendes

Acting

José Manuel Mendes

Acting credits

No artwork available
7.0

Cristina is twenty years old. Her father was declared missing in action during the war in Angola many years before. One day in church the girl meets a man about fifty years old who tries various times, unsuccessfully, to make the sign of the cross. The man is called Cristovão. A few days later the two meet again. The man offers to help her look for her father. A relationship based on memories and confessions is formed between them. But soon they each return to their own solitude.

Paraíso Perdido

1995

A Girl in Summer poster
6.2

It is the end of summer and Isabel is a relationship with Diogo. She don't quite know what she wants from her life going forward as her father gets sick.

A Girl in Summer

1986

An Outpost of Progress poster
6.3

At the end of the nineteenth century, two inexperienced Portuguese colonizers, with a vague intention of civilizing the colonies, disembark in a remote part of the Congo River in order to coordinate a trading post. As time goes by, they become increasingly demoralized by their inability to profit from the ivory trade. A mutual feeling of distrust and misunderstadings with the locals isolate them at the heart of the tropical jungle. Faced with each other, they begin a journey towards the abyss.

An Outpost of Progress

2016

The Uncertainty Principle poster
6.5

Having lost her place among the social elite, a widow remarries and starts a family.

The Uncertainty Principle

2002

The Last Bath poster
4.3

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

The Last Bath

2020

Boys On Film 4: Protect Me From What I Want poster
3.5

Elliot Tittensor (TV's Shameless) stars as Daz in headlining film PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT, a gripping British film debut that sees him woo a young lad in an underpass, only to be threatened with a break-up the following morning. Passive and submissive roles are tackled and tugged in gay graffiti tale VANDALS and Icelandic grapple-fest WRESTLING, while POSTMORTEM, MY NAME IS LOVE, and Iris Prize-winner STEAM look at promising encounters that turn awry. Rounding out the collection are HEIKO, an alternative ode to foot fetishes, BREATH where 12-year-old Erik swims out to sea to make a daring move on his best friend's father, and the crème de la crème from this collection TREVOR, which won multiple prestigious awards from Sundance, Berlinale, and even The Academy Awards (Oscar) for Best Short Film.

Boys On Film 4: Protect Me From What I Want

2010

Just Retired 2 poster
5.2

Marilou and Philippe decide to show their grandchildren their new holiday home in Portugal. But once there, they discover to their horror that the house is still under construction. This is just the beginning of the problems for the grandparents, because soon they will lose their children. They have only two days left to find them, before their parents join them.

Just Retired 2

2022

The Metamorphosis of Birds poster
6.6

Filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos sifts through the memories of her ancestors. Her naval officer grandfather, Henrique, who married her grandmother, Beatriz, on her 21st birthday, spent extended periods at sea, leaving her with six children. This is the beginning of a generational saga.

The Metamorphosis of Birds

2021

The Maias: Story of a Portuguese Family poster
5.8

The tragedy and comedy in Carlos' life begins, grows and ends like the tragedy and comedy of Portugal. In the company of his close friend, João da Ega, allegedly a brilliant writer, Carlos, with his idle existence as an aristocratic doctor, spends his time to enjoying friends and lovers. Until he falls in love. She is a new character in this revolutionary novel. It's a vertiginous passion that goes beyond that past gloominess to reach a new and darker abyss, incest.

The Maias: Story of a Portuguese Family

2014

Mysteries of Lisbon poster
7.2

The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure.

Mysteries of Lisbon

2010

Love Torn in a Dream poster
7.8

A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the convent. These rather ironic paradoxes turn this fairytale into a philosophical fable.

Love Torn in a Dream

2000

Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One poster
7.0

Scheherazade narrates three more tales, supposedly selected from the 470th, 484th and 497th nights of her ordeal: “It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport himself to escape the Guard while dreaming of prostitutes and partridges. A wounded cow will reminisce about a thousand-year-old olive tree while saying what she must say, which will sound none less than sad!

Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One

2015

The Strange Case of Angelica poster
6.5

A photographer, Isaac, is asked by hotel owners to take portraits of their recently deceased daughter Angélica. When he looks at her through the lens of his camera, she appears to come back to life just for him. He instantly falls in love with her. From that moment, he will be haunted by Angélica day and night.

The Strange Case of Angelica

2010

The Cannibals poster
7.0

This odd film is a major representative of an even odder film genre: direct-to-celluloid opera. It was commissioned by the Portuguese master of style, director Manoel de Oliveira from composer João Paes. Musically, it ranges from 19th-century romanticism to popular, modernist and even "post-modernist" styles. In the initially tame story, a host-narrator tells the story of a wedding between the two lovebirds: Viscount d'Aveleda and the beautiful Marguerite. However, what happens in the bridal chamber is incredibly bizarre. The events after that are even stranger, and the wedding guests and family indulge in cannibalism, among other perversions.

The Cannibals

1988

Amor e Dedinhos de Pé poster
10.0

Macau 1897. Life is easy for Portuguese settlers. Young reveler Francisco Frontaria is deemed as irresponsible for all his partying and boozing. Shunned and exiled for crossing a line by insulting the daughter of a prominent family, he finds himself penniless and vagrant.

Amor e Dedinhos de Pé

1993

A Hora da Liberdade poster
5.1

Based on the events which took place the night of April 24th, 1999 in Portugal. This is the story of the Coup d'État which put an end to the Dictatorship and reinstated the Democracy.

A Hora da Liberdade

1999

The Fifth Empire poster
6.5

Manoel de Oliveira directs José Régio's historical epic of religious and political power struggles. King Sebastião plans to make Portugal the world's Fifth Empire.

The Fifth Empire

2004

Heiko poster
6.3

A 70-year-old man is in a relationship with a young man named Heiko. It is a fetishist relationship taken to extreme exoticism.

Heiko

2008

No Dia dos Meus Anos poster
6.0

This Portuguese movie directed by João Botelho, is part of The Four Elements series. This is the second episode, The Air.

No Dia dos Meus Anos

1992

Índia poster
6.0

Tiago, a tour guide with a broken heart leads Karen, a grieving and aging Brazilian woman, around a Lisbon of strange suicidal heroes. Tiago lives with his father, Raul, an old sailor haunted by historical defeats, and with his son, Manuel, a teenager fantasising of a solitary, but erotic, trip to the cosmos. All together, they take Karen through dreams, lost glories, and catastrophes to meet a fallen hero who disappeared many centuries ago on an island in the South Atlantic Ocean.

Índia

2022

Terra Nova, Mar Velho poster
9.0

Journey of a cod trawler to Newfoundland waters for cod fishing.

Terra Nova, Mar Velho

1983

Uma História do Espectador de Cinema poster
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Uma História do Espectador de Cinema

2023

Empty Hands poster
NR

A dark and surreal comedy about a depressed mortician who asks his dead clients for life advice.

Empty Hands

2021