Daniel Martinho
Pérola (39 years), a female lawyer, return to Angola, for her younger sister´s “Alambamento” (traditional Angolan ceremony where dowries and promises are exchanged between a couple) more than 20 years living abroad. On coming back, she realises that she does not fit in that environment anymore. The world that saw her come to life is now uncomfortable. In the beginning, she remains apart, watching all her parents do and say in a judgmental way, but as the party unfolds, Pérola starts to see the beauty of the place. That land and it´s People reveal a charm that she was not expecting and suddenly she understands that all her loneliness and emptiness she has felt all those years was only her home beckoning her back.
VEGA is a smalltime wiseguy who teams up with the most delinquent smalltime criminals to payback BARBAS the leader of the gang that betrayed him.
We stare at mirrors as if 'image' was a weapon of self-defense. At night, I hide in actors' dressing rooms for a working class experience. By day, I face an old theatre being razed to the ground, making way for a parking lot. Graffitis have curtains, the nose cap of an umbrella arises from a mount of sand. Oh, Happy Days! No need to stage anything! The bulldozer is a dinosaur whose teeth and gracious neck swings by a EU flag. In the boxes, we await the audience. Sometimes, nobody comes. Lost in a symbolic show of reality, I can only watch the world's end because all the endangered species perform and a reflecting labyrinth of life stories breaks through the glass of the Economic Eating Machine. Even when the sky is falling, theatre will always happen. So, choose the right place.
Two Angola, the colonial and the contemporary, spaced 60 years, share the curse of a mysterious island. In the past, the epicenter of the tragedy is an evil fortress, tomb of revolutionaries deported from the mainland. In the present, the building of a luxurious resort awakens the relentless jaw of justice. Soon after, workmen lacerated dead bodies, begin to appear. The horror spreads rapidly. Pedro Mbala is sent to the island to solve the problem. His target is a pack of stray dogs.
A documentary essay about a text that penetrates lives and lives that penetrate a text. In September 2015 teatro GRIOT - a theatre company based in Lisbon, whose actors are mostly Afro-descendants - started to rehearse Shakespeare's "The Tempest" with acclaimed director Bruno Bravo in a little coastal village. Starting with the first rehearsals the film explores Shakespeare's text and the actors' biographies, between the play and the landscape and brings up topics such as memories, home, emigration and colonialism. A complex mosaic of multiple voices.
Paulo Lima is an engineer responsible for a multinational factory. Due to the recession, the factory receives a visit from the factory's owner's daughter, Luísa, who is sent to increase the factory's profit. Some cuts are due to make.
The Idalecio family is close to imploding emotionally. During the weekly Sunday drive all falls apart. It starts with a claustrophobic car trip through town. Nagging children, football on the radio, a mother in law with a sharp tongue, a new pregnancy. It is a day of unhappiness, a day that will turn around their lives. An anti-Sunday.
For a 13-year-old boy like Filipe, the prospect of a summer vacation in the Azores with his father is like a dream come true. But dreams are sometimes just a way to avoid facing reality.
A rock star-turned-bum, his vocal chords severed at the height of his career for the love of a woman, reclaims his forgotten past after viewing a music video and seeks revenge against the mobster who maimed him.
