O Som e a Fúria

The end of the Cold War did not bring about a definitive thaw in the former republics of the Soviet Union, so that today there are several frozen conflicts, unresolved for decades, in that vast territory. As in Transnistria, an unrecognized state, seceded from Moldova since 1990. Kolja is a silent witness of how borders and bureaucracy shape the lives of citizens, finally forced to lose their identity.

A journey through the real history and the tales of a region in southern Portugal and a portrait of the people who have lived there, weaving together accounts of rural workers and field notes of archaeologists, amateur footage and scientific drawings, legends, poems, and songs.

The start of Luís Rovisco’s old age isn’t exactly cheerful. Already in his sixties, he’s still roaming the country by himself, carrying out his tasks — increasingly less real — as sales director for the company SegurVale. Sadness, resignation? Not with the songs Luís makes up behind the wheel, and that take over this film from start to finish.

In the middle of the night, Magloire is smoking a cigarette in an abandoned train station when the police shows up for an ID check. He starts running with no luggage, no future until he meets a dying man from whom he inherits a fortune. Magloire is now pursued by a gang. He becomes their hostage, but accomplice too. As he doesn’t anything to lose. Like someone who gets away with everything, someone with no expectations…

Lisbon, Portugal, 1927. The writer and journalist Fernando Pessoa accepts from his boss the commission to create an advertising slogan for the drink Coca-Louca; but conservative government authorities consider the new drink as revolutionary as it is diabolical.

Lisbon, Portugal, 2010. Pilar, a pious woman devoted to social causes, maintains a peculiar relationship with her neighbor Aurora, a temperamental old woman obsessed with gambling who lives tormented by a mysterious past.

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!

In which Scheherazade doubts that she will still be able to tell stories to please the King, given that what she has to tell weighs three thousand tonnes. She therefore escapes from the palace and travels the Kingdom in search of pleasure and enchantment. Her father, the Grand-Vizier, arranges to meet her at the Ferris wheel, and Scheherazade resumes her narration: “Auspicious King, in old shanty towns of Lisbon there was a community of bewitched men who, in all rigour and passion, dedicated themselves to teaching birds to sing…”. And seeing the morning break, Scheherazade fell silent.

About three generations of a family grappling with a life-changing experience during one day of a vacation in the historic town of Sintra, Portugal.

In the heart of Portugal, amid the mountains, the month of August is abuzz with people and activity...

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.

The story of Brazil’s first emperor, returning to Europe on board the English ship Warspite. The trip makes Pedro conquer his fears and face his life from a personal point of view. He goes back in time and relives outstanding moments of his earlier life – since his childhood, when in 1808 he arrived coming from Portugal with his family, until he left in the dead of the night, in 1831, running away from Brazil.

A 2008 short made in accompaniment with Our Beloved Month of August, documenting Gomes's and his crew's hapless search, during 2007's carnival, for one of Arganil's most storied and elusive characters (who does, in fact, ultimately appear as an interviewee/player in the finished film). Paulo "Miller" is known for taking a dangerous jump into the Alva from a bridge each year during carnival, but what this film is about is, in keeping with the free-roving feature, much less the subject himself than Gomes and co.'s inability to pin him down; not only does he not do his famous jump during this year's carnival, but an ostensible technical/audio failure (as with the feature, it's very difficult to say how much of this film is "fact," how much invented) during Gomes's initial on-camera meeting with Paulo "Miller" leads to five minutes of lip-readers attempting to decipher their conversation.

Obsessed with questions about his past, a bankrupt, white Brazilian filmmaker undertakes an epic journey from Brazil to Mozambique and Portugal. This melancholic fable mixes animation, live-action, voice-overs, genres, and continents to explore Brazil's colonial past.

'In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the belongings of each guest of the hotel and observed through the details, lives that will remain unknown', says the temporary Chambermaid in a large seaside hotel, which, unable to communicate, lives through a rigid methodology of analysis of the exterior and a ritualised quotidian. Until the uncontrollable comes to disrupts this dynamic. Hotel Royal is fragmented and incomplete mosaic of contemporary societies. It could be dubbed a film about the horrors of the soul, about voyeurs or simply about misfits.

A man, Francisco, works in an open-pit mine. He goes to see his boss about taking the following day off. At first the boss doesn’t want to allow it as there is so much to do, but he finally concedes. The next day his daughter calls on him, a visit he no longer counted on. They spend the day with one another. The longer they are together, and the later the night gets, the more absurd the situations and moments they experience become.

Ramiro is a bookstore owner in Lisbon and a poet in perpetual creative block. He lives, somewhat frustrated, somewhat conformed, between his shop and the tavern, accompanied by his dog, his faithful drinking companions and his neighbors: a pregnant teenager and her grandmother recovering from a stroke. He would gladly continue living this quiet and somewhat anachronistic routine if events worthy of a soap opera did not invade his bubble.

The Empire Hotel is a 30-year-old landmark in Macau's old quarter, inhabited by characters with their own stories and struggles. It is also Maria's home. One day, the burden of keeping lives together and the hotel standing falls on her shoulders. A young man who left Macau two decades ago returns, intent on revenge and reclaiming his mother's fortune – half the hotel. Inside the casino, Maria sings Fado and exotic dancers perform. It is against this illusory backdrop that the man lays eyes on Maria for the first time; they’re both mesmerized. The film cuts back and forth between film noir-style scenes of Macau’s past and present.

At Uz, an isolated hamlet in the northern mountains of Portugal, four generations live together in a group of around fifty people. When life is rough, solidarity is of the highest order. Everything else is left in God’s hands. They could have emigrated, like so many others, but chose to stay and keep their ancestral way of life, away from the racket of modernity.

On January 21, 1975, in a village in the north of Portugal, a child writes to his parents who are in Angola to tell them how sad Portugal is. On July 13, 2011, in Milan, an old man remembers his first love. On May 6, 2012, in Paris, a man tells his baby daughter that he will never be a real father. During a wedding ceremony on September 3, 1977 in Leipzig, the bride battles against a Wagner opera that she can’t get out of her head. But where and when have these four poor devils begun searching for redemption?