José Cardoso Pires - Diário de Bordo

A personal tribute to the poet Alexandre O'Neill by his dear friend Fernando Lopes.

The documentary about the life of Fernando Pessoa, defended by journalist Clara Ferreira Alves, underlines how, in just 30 years, Fernando Pessoa built an immense body of work, of astonishing quality and all of this while being nothing more than an anonymous office worker all his life.

A digressive quest, through conversations with various people, about the need humanity has always had to tell stories about itself, about the power and enchantment of fiction.

"I write to have a mountain of books when I die." Psychiatrist António Lobo Antunes is one of the most internationally recognized Portuguese writers. His novels, usually settled in Lisbon, are published in prestigious publishers in several countries (Christian Bourgois, Random House, Luchterhand). In Nordlund's film, the characters and scenes from his books constantly interrupt the writer's speech. Lisbon invades his home. The voices of the characters impose themselves to the writer's house. António Lobo Antunes compares his writing to a watercourse that leaves to freely find its way.

Lisbon, 1938. Mr. Pereira is the editor of the culture section of an evening paper. Although fascism is on the rise in Europe, like in nearby civil war Spain or even inside Portugal itself in the form of Salazar's regime, Pereira only concerns himself with writing bios and translating French novels. Things change after he hires a young writer as his assistant, getting to know also his girlfriend – both opponents to the regime – and reluctantly helps them when they begin to get in trouble for subversive activities. Eventually, he's forced to take a stand...

Spino, a pathologist, receives an unidentified body which looks familiar to him... himself, 30 years younger.

In 1971, António Lobo Antunes' life is brutally interrupted when he is drafted into the Portuguese Army to serve as a doctor in one of the worst zones of the Colonial War – the East of Angola. Away from everything dear he writes letters to his wife while he is immersed in an increasingly violent setting. While he moves between several military posts he falls in love for Africa and matures politically. At his side, an entire generation struggles and despairs for the return home. In the uncertainty of war events, only the letters can make him survive.

In Lisbon, French author Paul meets various people from his past who uncover forgotten memories.

The enigmatic but vivid imagery of this loosely plotted film is based on a similarly evocative novel by the Italian author Antonio Tabucchi, Noturno Indiano. An old friend of the hero's has been living in Bombay with a prostitute. His friend Peter Schlemihl (Otto Tausig) is a concentration camp survivor, who went to India after being captivated by a photograph he saw there. When the prostitute writes to him in Europe asking that he rescue his friend from a mysterious malaise, he flies into India to try and help. When he gets to Bombay, he discovers that his friend has disappeared. Following the clues left behind by the friend, and based on his acquaintance with him, he journeys to Madras to speak to a Theosophist dignitary there, and then journeys on to Portugues Goa. With each step of his journey, the hero (Jean-Hugues Anglade) becomes more identified with his friend, and re-enacts in his own person the transformations he must have experienced.

Nuno is the son of divorced parents. He lives a nomadic existence with his father: he lost all his friends and never stays long enough anywhere to make new friends. Now Nuno has become a drug addict, he’s in hospital, in a coma struggling between life and death. His father and his father’s sister remain by his bedside. The three separately evoke requests from the past and other characters they meet also complement their current life experiences and memories. Based on the novel by António Lobo Antunes.

"Dama de Porto Pim" tells the story of a rich woman who arrives at a little Portuguese island while her husband is in the II World War; there, a humble fisherman, promised to marry a girl of the town, falls in love with her, and she will also fall in love with him, but his husband could come back.

What is the shady affair in which the woman is involved, and what is her role? Is or isn't the man a marquis? Who is the young man played by Fabrizio Bentivoglio, and why does he own that car? Does Basque nationalism have to do anything with the story? Everybody has something to hide, everybody seems guilty.