António Fonseca

On April 25, 1974, a man walked alone in Largo do Carmo. He knocked on the GNR military barracks door and entered, unarmed and without any escorts. Inside, the Government’s chief, Marcelo Caetano, waited, surrounded by the military and the people. The man who stared at him that afternoon and demanded surrender, guaranteeing his safety, had just led Santarém’s Artillery 1 regiment in taking the capital. Without firing a single shot, he managed to overthrow a regime that was over 48 years old. That was the last step to take and he took it, without hesitation, becoming the unavoidable figure of the day that marked the beginning of democracy in Portugal

At the age of 71, a highly regarded writer, José Cardoso Pires, suffers a major stroke and loses his memory and the ability to relate to the rest of the world. Everybody seems to defy the famous author to write another novel that recounts this adventure telling his "last story", the most conclusive of his career, the one of his accidental journey to the clear shadows territory.

Pê, a man with terminal cancer, wanders through his city, Lisbon. Throughout the day, he is confronted with a reality unaware of his suffering while he prepares his imminent death by writing a farewell letter to his daughter. When emptying her father’s house, the daughter discovers the letter. It is the beginning of a new encounter.

Pavese considered Dialogues with Leucò his best work. Eloquent and at the same time sententious and fragile, but implausible among humanized gods, demigods, heroes, and other pagan figures of Greek mythology, who question, through the imaginary of myths, the society of contemporary man. Out of a time and a certain space, and thus, and like all myths, always current.

One night on Viva FM's late night show, host Vitor Lobo gets a phone call from an old friend.

A respectable family falls into crisis when their extensive apple orchard is ruined. Delgado, a wealthy industrialist from the North, has just arrived in the village, apparently with good intentions. Desperate to keep up appearances, the Major and D. Lúcia introduce him to their innocent and eccentric daughter, Cilinha, who is only interested in her singing lessons. They entice him with the prospect of a rich dowry, but they are unaware that Delgado is not quite who he appears to be...

Lúcia is raped by her husband and presses charges against him. She fights the Portuguese legal system along with the Prosecutor's Assistant, Maria João Correia, to force her husband, the son of the State's Vice Attorney, into Court. The case takes place in closed session where Lúcia tries to find justice in a predominantly male world.

Xavier, a village boy, falls for Laura, neighbor's granddaughter who visits her grandfather annually. Despite flirting at summer dances, Xavier believes he has no chance with her.

Fiction is never very far from reality. A young man, of Portuguese heritage, decides to do a PhD based on the documentary The Good People of Portugal, a work from 1980, also directed by Rui Simões. This opens the door to a parallel between the reality of the film we see and that of PREC, the moment of the studied documentary and the contemporary world, with the young Michel in between.

In a terrifying Portuguese village, there is a legend - the legend of the wolf child. Desired and born on a full moon night, it all started when a young peasant girl, desperate for a child, asked a creature of the forest for a wish. The desire? A child she could call hers. But the forest creature curses the woman. When fully grown, the child will bring teeth and blood to the village. Years pass, the child becomes a man, tormented and persecuted by the villagers, torn between his animalistic nature and a friendship with a young witch. The boy has to discover who, or what, he is. Together, the wolf child and the witch will try to break the curse and find their place in the world. 16 years after "Coisa Ruim", Frederico Serra returns to the legends and traditions of deep Portugal.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1950. In the conservative home of the Gusmão family, Eurídice and Guida are two inseparable sisters who support each other. While Guida can share with her younger sister the details of her romantic adventures, Eurídice finds in her older sister the encouragement she needs to pursue her dream of becoming a professional pianist.

Between February and July 1858, in the Massabielle cave, the Virgin appeared eighteen times to Bernadette Soubirous, a miserable little girl from Lourdes. A true revolution in the heart of the Second Empire that shakes the established order by his universal message of love and prayer.

No synopsis available yet.

Paris, March 1939. While the march of the Nazi troops makes itself heard throughout Europe, exiled artists and intellectuals from all over the world still converge in the French capital. Portuguese composer Fernando Lopes-Graça is among them, sharing this cosmopolitan environment, on the verge of rupture. A happy coincidence brings him into the presence of the man he considers his master, the intransigent Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. For Lopes-Graça, the occasion presents itself as a unique opportunity to show Bartók his scores...

In the 17th century a warrior woman fights for the independence of Angola. After witnessing the murder of her son and watching her people being humiliated by Portuguese colonizers, Njinga will become a Queen and struggle for their liberation embodying the motto: those who stay fight to win.

A biographical drama about revolutionary Anita Garibaldi.

Rita is fifteen and spends the summer between warm afternoons of teenage love and party nights with her friend Sara. From Portugal to the South Pacific, the pleasures of this routine will take a turn when the young girl visits the art show of a new neighbor in the local community.

George, a charismatic and adventurous young woman, born from an old, catholic family, falls in love, in her teens, with a female teacher named Sybil. Devastated by her lover's eventual suicide, some years later, George embarks on an exciting and reckless journey to the depths of Pigalle's nightlife, circa 1960. After an encounter with a very wealthy, still attractive, but older woman, Odete, who offers her money and gifts in return for sexual favours, George becomes Gigola, a kind of gigolo for women only.

Zézé Gamboa's sardonic historical drama follows a good-hearted, apolitical con man who, on the eve of Angolan independence in the mid-1970s, pulls off a massive swindle at the expense of the Portuguese colonial administration — and soon after finds himself hailed as a hero of the national liberation struggle.

Threatened by a fascist plot, the Portuguese government recruits several "special people" to stop the coup.

It tells the story of a Brazilian filmmaker, Lucas. When his mother, Alice, dies in Belo Horizonte, he searches for his family's Portuguese roots across the ocean, discovering an intricate love story. Lucas's father, Olavo, was the son of a very wealthy Portuguese industrialist, Joaquim, who was disinherited when he married Alice, Lucas's mother, a very poor woman who lived in a rooming house in the city of Porto, Portugal. With the Second World War looming, they all left for Brazil, settling in Minas Gerais. While investigating his distant past, Lucas makes discoveries about possible criminal acts committed by his own father, Olavo. Lucas is helped by Teresa, a young Portuguese woman who works as a restorer of old Portuguese churches in the interior of Portugal. Lucas, assisted by Teresa, seeks to reconstruct the stories of his mother Alice, and ends up falling in love with Teresa.

They are both alone. They need each other but, at the same time, they despise each other. Siblings Marcos and Susana are unable to heal the old wounds festering within them after the death of their mother. When Susana sells their mother's flat, she deprives her brother of the home where he had cared for their mother his whole life. Marcos's need to start living again surfaces when his sister forces him to leave Buenos Aires for Uruguay.

In a remote village in Alentejo, the train is the only connection to the world and to the politics of the capital. The news of the establishment of the Republic is spread by telegraph, but in this Alentejo village, telegraph operator Miguel Zuzarte is a staunch monarchist who hides the message he has received from everyone. For days, the people wonder about the absence of the train, and the telegraph operator does everything he can to cover up the unreported news. The train will return to the village, and the impact of the end of the monarchy is not what one might imagine.

Tiago Guedes returns to Dennis Kelly, the British playwright with whom he has already enjoyed success in his dizzying descent into the depths of human complexity. After Órfãos, the director and stage director now tackles The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas, a 2013 text about the banality of evil in the person of the man that Kelly's play scrutinizes in retrospect: "Existence is not what you thought it was until now. It is not honest, it is not kind, it is not fair. Most of the world has no idea about this; they believe in God, or Daddy, or Marx, or the invisible hand of the market, or honesty, or kindness. They go through life with their eyes closed, getting beaten up and screwed over. He's like that. You're like that. But a tiny part of us, let's call ourselves the resistance, knows the true nature of life. The world is ours for the taking. We are powerful and rich and have everything, because we will do whatever it takes.

A woman and two dogs inside a city house. She rediscovers herself in daily gestures and in the remembrance of whom has left. The sun blinds her, it becomes fierce, and like death, she cannot look it in the eye - only to the shadows around her

The story about the romance of Snu Abecassis and the former Portuguese prime minister Sá Carneiro.

Maria spends her daytime sewing and cleaning, while at night she works as a prostitute in Oporto's streets. Years ago her path crossed with José, a married man who became her most faithful client but who couldn't help her to escape the hard life. Today this old prostitute continues showing off her body through the long city's nights, though the clients are almost gone. José is still there, but he failed at what she desired the most: a son. In a very intimate and raw portray of a woman, MARIA disclosures how love and getting older can feels like.

Shaken by a divorce in the 1920s, Portuguese poetess Florbela Espanca uses her writing to deal with her tumultuous relationship with men, eroticism and love.

Humberto hanged himself. Catarina, Paulo and Victor want the company where Humberto used to work for to take responsibility in his death, leading them to kidnappe the company’s director in an act of despair. Who is Humberto? What company is that? In which paths will he take us, after his death? Cinerama is an edgy, enigmatic, but not distant film that brings up genres of cinema as well as other forms of art like dance, theatre and poetry. The film reflects ways of being in life.

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

Follows the fictional rivalry between two of Portugal's most prominent football teams - Invicta e Castelo and how their mutual disdain has spread further than the pitch.

The darkness of night, a barely lit place, motorbikes flirting with danger: a group of teenagers at a crossroads playing chicken with unaware passing cars. Jota (Eduardo Frazão) stands out from this group, unclassifiable; his destiny has no straight lines save those on the asphalt. Jota lives in permanent conflict with everything and everybody in his small town. No room for stillness. And then comes Margarida (Ana Moreira). Jota has no inside, Margarida has no outside. In spite of, or because of, that, they meet. What can they do? They can just ride, they can get away with it even if its all messed up. Love is to be lived.

The story about the last man to be sentenced to death in Portugal.

A director is trying to stage the play “The Jew of Linz”, but his dementia and delirium can’t take the production past rehearsals. The venue cancels the play and the director and his leading man go on an odyssey where they can’t distinguish life from fiction.

In mid-September 1992, journalist Guida Fontes have to go to Luanda to cover the elections in Angola. In the meantime, she had committed herself to discovering and interviewing the poet Júlio Vera. In 1988, he wrote a series of poems in which he mysteriously anticipated the fall of the USSR. Guida has only 12 days to complete the mission.

Royal romance and epic tragedy feature in this historical drama about Pedro I of Portugal and his lover, Ines de Castro. Their legendary, doomed love story is explored, as well as the darkness surrounding Pedro's powerful, sadistic father.

Rui was raised in Mozambique in a small village at the frontier of a mysterious river. Son of Portuguese colonists, his best friend is Ana, a black girl godchild of his mother. At fourteen he is confronted with the tragic destruction of his childhood and has to learn to recognize two distinct realities - the European and the African.

An act of passion, filmed in a church turned into a bar, on Easter 2003, and starring as many actors as the days of the year… Taking the sacred painting as a reference, the film questions the human condition: letting oneself die like Christ or betray scientifically like Peter?

Three homeless teenage rejects struggle to survive together. Of them, Andreia is pregnant, while Pedro and Ricardo hustle, steal and are exploited by a pornographer.

A blind beggar is robbed of his chest of money. The theft leads to a dramatic situation in the street where he begs every day.

Colonial war in Africa. During a patrol, in the woods, a Portuguese soldier steps on a mine, that will explode when he raises his foot...