Tall Stories

A meditation on civilization. July, 2001: friends wave as a cruise ship departs Lisbon for Mediterranean ports and the Indian Ocean. On board and on day trips in Marseilles, Pompeii, Athens, Istanbul, and Cairo, a professor tells her young daughter about myth, history, religion, and wars. Men approach her; she's cool, on her way to her husband in Bombay. After Cairo, for two evenings divided by a stop in Aden, the captain charms three successful, famous (and childless) women, who talk with wit and intellect, each understanding the others' native tongue, a European union. The captain asks mother and child to join them. He gives the girl a gift. Helena sings. Life can be sweet.

A police detective in a South American country is dedicated to hunting down a revolutionary guerilla leader.

Having lost her place among the social elite, a widow remarries and starts a family.

A philosophy-obsessed serial rapist stalks a university campus in broad daylight.

On a train to Algarve, a young man recounts to a fellow passenger his past relationship with an eccentric young woman.

Anna, Joyce, Claude, and Cécile are four young actresses sharing a Paris apartment while attending intense acting workshops led by their demanding teacher Constance. As they rehearse scenes and navigate the tensions of living together, their personal lives begin to grow complicated when Joyce becomes involved with a mysterious older man whose presence slowly pulls the others into a web of secrets and suspicions, blurring the boundary between the roles they perform and the lives they're actually living.

The recollections of a Portuguese teacher in the present will make us follow his father, Manuel, former fighter in our colonial war and constantly tormented with those memories. He'll walk us through the depths of the physical sites that haunt him - from training barracks to the lakes and gardens of his youth and infatuation - and also to his memory's gulf - war and passion combined, entangled, in a battle that questions or howls immemorial existential doubts.

Despite his age and general weariness, Gebo keeps on working as an accountant to provide for his family. He lives with his wife, Doroteia, and his daughter-in-law, Sofia, but it is the absence of João, son and husband, that worries them.Gebo seems to be hiding something, especially to Doroteia, who is anxiously waiting to see her son again. Sofia is also waiting for her husband to come home, and yet she fears him. All of a sudden, João arrives and everything changes.

1920s. Vitalino, a small farmer from São Vicente sees his father die of the epidemic which decimated the country. Some years later, of all the brothers, Vitalino is the strongest and takes his father’s place in the house. But the village is too small for his aspirations and he decides to head to Brazil, leaving his sisters in charge of the household. In parallel with Vitalino’s story, If I Were a Thief… I’d Steal portrays the world of Paulo Rocha rummaging through his films and ghosts over the years.

In Brazzaville, in 1944, Alex Emmerich was sentenced to wander the seas by Hélène Latray, the wife of Félix Beauvois, the man Alex loved. In 1962, exiled on Hatray cruises and feeling the coming death, Alex decides to compose for his love a testament: the photographic report of his agony.

Manoel is an aging film director who travels with the film crew through Portugal in search of the origins of Afonso, a famous French actor whose father emigrated from Portugal to France and in process remembers his own youth.

A film adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel "Hard Times" set in a Portuguese industrial town of the 1980s.

This Portuguese movie directed by João Botelho, is part of The Four Elements series. This is the second episode, The Air.

Guinea-Bissau: Portuguese Colony, year: 1973. An Ex-military returns to his hometown. Bringing back with him a vague sense of guilt due to the killing of two men (a soldier and a native) by his sounding of the alarm during one given night.

Ema is a very attractive but innocent girl, so pretty that cars crash in her presence. In her youth she marries Dr. Carlos Paiva, her father's friend, to whom she is not attracted. They move to the valley of Abraham. Carlos loves her, but decides to sleep in a separate room to avoid waking Ema when he has to return late at night. As time goes by she begins to feel unhappy about her marriage, so she finds a new lover.

At the end of the seventeenth century, in Naples, still dominated by the Spaniards, a young pupil, Balthasar,is castrated to preserve the purity and beauty of his voice. The Duchess dies and her son, the Duke of Arcos, takes charge of the inheritance, which includes Balthasar. With the entrance of Maria Loffredo, former lover of the Duke, a triangle is established that unchains tragic consequences to the allegedly callous life of Balthasar.

Story of the 1974 coup that overthrew the right-wing Portuguese dictatorship--which continued the fascist policies of long-time dictator Antonio Salazar--and of two young army captains who were involved in it.

Manuel and Pedro have different approaches to love. Manuel suffers a disgust that makes him sullen, and enters the priesthood. Pedro keeps on in his carefree ways, and commits a robbery. Manuel knows the robber is Pedro, but he learned it in Catholic confession. To keep his vows as a priest, he is prepared to be arrested.

Feckless aspiring architect Stéphane leaves his pregnant girlfriend for theater designer Sabine; Sabine in turn vainly attempts to overcome her violent obsession with an actor in her theater company. A game of emotional chutes and ladders ensues.

Jan thinks he is Swedish-Danish, but after his mother's death he discovers he was adopted. As his world begins to fall apart, he decides to find his birth parents. The hunt leads him to Portugal - in a taxi - where more surprises await him.

A young man from a high-bourgeois family, Henrique receives mysterious phone calls from a woman at the barracks where he is serving in the military, which attracts him to meetings without consequences.

Laura lives in the country with her considerably older husband. When Nuno, her brother who study in Lisbon, pays a visit, he realizes that his sister does not have a happy life. He initiates a friendship with a worker on the farm. The circumstances turn Laura and Nuno against each other...

One night Jorge will meet with a Japanese industrialist, who will allow him to abandon his teaching position and resume his chemical work. However, when he gets home he finds a person there.

A renowned symbol of Portuguese interventionist theatre, Cornucópia emerged from the darkness of fascism to fight dictatorship on stage. Among the classics, a project is born and dies, but one face remains emblematic: Luís Miguel Cintra, who shared his art with the constant complicity of set designer Cristina Reis. Together, guided by images, they bear witness, telling this story.

When a man's best friend is shot in cold blood by two corrupt policemen, he must track down the only eyewitnesses, who have deported to Mali.

Zephyrus is a film-voyage, a fresco about Southern Portugal. A movie dealing metaphorically with the South of Portugal, singling it out as a place where various cultures came together and mix, giving birth to a singular identity, as unique as this movie itself, a mixture of fiction and documentary

Authentically painful study of an ill-matched couple's forlorn attempts to revive their relationship after a two-year break.

The Life of Mirrors is one of the sections of the exhibition Luis Miguel Cintra - Small Theatre of the World. A commission by Serralves Foundation to Regina Guimarães and Saguenail, and constructed after an unpublished interview with Luis Miguel Cintra, this film is the result of a long and painstaking exercise of selecting and editing excerpts from films by Manoel de Oliveira in which Cintra participates as an actor. In this way, The Life of Mirrors is a reflective, retrospective essay film, which opens the Carte Blanche, thus establishing a gateway to Luis Miguel Cintra's cinematographic and cinephile career.

On her journey to a provincial capital, Elena falls for the director of the Company of Zarzuela and leaves with him, despite opposition from his father. But the guilt of having abandoned him pursues her constantly to the point to shake their relationship.