Weekend

In the turbulence of urban life, we tend to underestimate things we need. This documentary asks seventy inhabitants from various social and age groups in the Lisbon metropolitan area to mention what they need the most, and thus a very particular portrait of contemporary Portuguese society is composed.

Amor Fati seeks out parts that complete each other. These are portraits of couples, friends, families and pets and their owners. They share the intimacy of daily life, habits, beliefs, tastes and even some physical traits. From their faces, from the choreography of their gestures, we unveil the story that binds them.

Ana was born in São Miguel, an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean ruled by religion and traditions. Growing up as the middle child of a family of three with her mother and grandmother. Early Ana realized that girls and boys were given different tasks. Through her friendship with Luis, her queer best friend who loves dresses as much as pants, Ana questions the world that is promised to her. When her friend Cloé arrives from Canada, bringing with her the glowing days of youth, Ana embarks on a journey that will take her beyond the horizon.

Cold Day is a portrait of a first relationship, previous to the external world, the one of the family. In a winter in Lisbon, father, mother, son and daughter trace the path of a day by themselves. A film that develops through characters who have for their antagonist life itself, with nothing (and everything) heroic about it.

The art of delusion is sculpted with images from a family archive from the 70s and 80s and sound clips from films. Madame Bovary is Flaubert's heroine and opens the hosts of this narrative exercise. Based on Ema Paiva's dialogue with her friend and confidant Pedro Lumiares in the film Vale Abraão by Manoel de Oliveira, we understand gender identity as a closed characterization of social values. Ema, who here represents Women in a broader sense, inherits a traditional life in a patriarchal society. Facing this oppression, Ema questions her condition and the society in which she operates. Thanks to the bovarism that integrates in each woman, the force of disobidience will burn the path that was once idealized for them.

On a summer's day, a mother, daughter and granddaughter's care-free day trip comes to an abrupt end. Beautiful and restrained.

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the National Ballet Company of Portugal, Cláudia Varejão delivers a documentary that approaches dance from an almost essayistic perspective, in which reflections on dance are intertwined with classes or the moments just before or after a performance. This curious gaze spills over what is usually offscreen, giving back images of an exciting beauty not coming from impostation, but from a sharp camera that is not afraid to get out of focus while jumping from one body to another, and also from an editing that, in order to perpetuate the movement, does not elide empty frames. Finally, a sincere praise of dance that is born from formal courage.

A dive, the midday sunlight filtering down through the water. The air in her lungs has to last until she can dislodge the abalone. Dives like these have been carried out in Japan for over 2000 years by the Ama-San.

The Ø island is composed of several landscapes within a single landscape. They are territories lived and shaped by interior and exterior time. There are no privatized territories on this island. They are landscapes that cannot be accommodated: they expand through encounters, clashes, pressures and frictions. Between silence and intimacy, new islands are sculpted, in a possible encounter between life and death.