The Swimming Pool
The way in which we cross, one time only, the space of a public swimming pool reminds us of life, from birth until the end.
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by João Viana
A and B get on the train, full of excitement Love and jealousy/Ashes and fire/Pain and sin Just before it leaves, C boards too. All this exists / All this is sad / All this is fado.
Mutar, who fought in the war, is back in Guinea. In his luggage, he brings strange objects. Fatu, his daughter, takes the opportunity of Mutar's absence to open his bag. Shortly afterwards, Fatu's boyfriend Idrissa finds Mutar with his hand soiled in blood and Fatu dead. It is then that Idrissa picks up a drum.
Fatu’s father has returned home to Guinea-Bissau from Portugal to attend her wedding. The young woman teaches at the university and her future husband is a well-known musician. Their wedding is supposed to take place in Tabatô, a village where everyone makes music. On the way there, it becomes apparent that the father is seriously traumatised by his experiences as a soldier in the colonial war decades earlier.
Ernania is hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in Mozambique. She dreams about her little son, Hanic, and her husband, Pak, who is a soldier of the war. In the meantime, a quirky musical instrument plays: her own bed. Ernania’s musical virtuosity, attracts the attention of the hospital nurses. One day, her song is played in a radio program and Rosa, an evangelical priest of “Rádio Moçambique”, goes to the hospital to listen to Ernania’s song. Ernania takes the priest’s visit as an opportunity to run away from the hospital.
João Viana, the crisis of cinema in one minute. On July 2010 the Portuguese Association of Directors challenged the Portuguese directors to do a sixty seconds long film with their own means of production. “Due to the lesser and weaker attention of the governments of this country to the Arts and Culture, where the lower budget is invested and with the goal to achieve improvements in the cultural policies, (…) we propose a challenge to direct a film that is a statement, an individual and completely free glance that will respond to the serious situation of the support of the Arts.
Lucy, regarded as crazy, has a son.
