Vanity

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

In 1917, outside the parish of Fátima, Portugal, a 10-year-old girl and her two younger cousins witness multiple visitations of the Virgin Mary, who tells them that only prayer and suffering will bring an end to World War I. As secularist government officials and Church leaders try to force the children to recant their story, word of the sighting spreads across the country, inspiring religious pilgrims to flock to the site in hopes of witnessing a miracle..

In pre-war Italy, a young couple have a baby boy. The father, however, is jealous of his son - and the scene moves to antiquity, where the baby is taken into the desert to be killed. He is rescued, given the name Oedipus, and brought up by the King and Queen of Corinth as their son. One day an oracle informs Oedipus that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he flees Corinth and his supposed parents - only to get into a fight and kill an older man on the road…

After discovering her fiancé's betrayal, Yasemin leaves everything behind and flees to Lisbon, where she unexpectedly finds herself sharing her rented home with its Portuguese owner, José. What starts as a clash between polar opposites gradually turns into a journey that reshapes both of their lives.

The comfortable daily routines of aging Parisian actor Gilbert Valence, 76, are suddenly shaken when he learns that his wife, daughter, and son-in-law have been killed in a car crash. Having to take care of his now-orphaned grandson, he struggles to go on with his lifelong acting career like he's used to. But the roles he is offered -- a flashy TV show and a hectic last-minute replacement in an English-language film of Joyce's Ulysses -- finally convince him that it's time to retire.

Burma, 1917. Edward, a civil servant for the British Empire, jilts his lovestruck fiancée Molly the day she arrives to be married. As he flees into an unexpected odyssey across Asia, the free-spirited Molly-amused by his moves-follows in pursuit, embarking on a globe-trotting cat-and-mouse chase.

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

In a distant past, Léon and Elvira Berthelini, itinerant artists, make their living hopping from town to town. In Covarronca, harassed by the Police Commissioner, they are forced to spend the night out in the open. That’s when they meet Stubbs, a young Cambridge student, with whom they find shelter in the home of a painter at odds with his wife. In return for the hospitality, they remind their hosts that the love of art resolves the art of love. Meanwhile, an unusual curse sends them on absurd journeys into the 21st century, where the future of social security and of a rock band are at stake.

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.

In love with Trás-os-Montes and with his Guide of Portugal as a source of inspiration, Miguel looks for stories for his new documentary. One day, the appearance of a man riding a donkey changes his future.

The story of a child who faces the emptiness that surrounds the figure of his parents, disappeared in Africa.

Tomás is a young teenager who fights for the leadership of a small marginal group. One night, in the world that he cannot control, his fallout leads to the death of one of the group's members. Laura, the possible witness to the crime, becomes a threat.

A largely plotless, fado-scored journey through the gloomy cobblestone streets, zombie bars, and fetid basements of a sordid harbor town populated by German-speaking sots and Portuguese guest workers. An unhappy young couple, Leni and Anton, quarrel and split separately into the rat’s ass of the evening. Everyone is looking for love, but no one finds any—although Leni does pick up a trick.

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.

Mitó lives in a small village and is the son of the local Comunist Party leader, she is 18 years-old and is about to graduate from the high-school she must attend at Beja - the nearest town. News that she killed her German boyfriend, at 4 a.m. on a desert road, do not excite much the editor of a Lisbon newspaper. He sends in a tyro reporter, Joaquim Peixoto, just in case. The young man, already considered hopless in his profession, will uncover more than a sex scandal to be used for political purposes. Written by Artemis-9

Scheherazade narrates three more tales, supposedly selected from the 470th, 484th and 497th nights of her ordeal: “It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport himself to escape the Guard while dreaming of prostitutes and partridges. A wounded cow will reminisce about a thousand-year-old olive tree while saying what she must say, which will sound none less than sad!

In mid-September 1992, journalist Guida Fontes have to go to Luanda to cover the elections in Angola. In the meantime, she had committed herself to discovering and interviewing the poet Júlio Vera. In 1988, he wrote a series of poems in which he mysteriously anticipated the fall of the USSR. Guida has only 12 days to complete the mission.

Set in the Lisbon during the festivities of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lovers and the old town. The story is about Cato, a nationalist politician who is charismatic and unscrupulous. He obsessively pursues Silvia, a mystical and mysterious young transvestite whom he meets at the festival. When Silvia runs into Vicente, a policeman who arrests transvestites and threatens them, Silvia must look towards blackmail to save herself. Compromising photos of Cato start to emerge among opposition parties and he must do all in his power to save his political career.

Emilia is a writer, living in Lisbon in the year 1959. She is the “Damsel Warrior”, a fictional woman composed from the literary universes of Maria Judite de Carvalho and Irene Lisboa, writers of the city and the characters that inhabit it.

The eternal guilt, the attempt at redemption, the infinite ramifications. There is no turning back to what Marília has done.

Guilherme and Sofia, brother and sister, grow up sharing experiences and slowly discovering their sexuality. The thing that Sofia doesn't know is how far Guilherme will go to keep her inside his own perverse, dark and perfect circle.

Catarina Menezes is a bisexual TV reporter who decides to have a child on her own and chooses Spanish humanitarian doctor Rafael to father the child, setting up an elaborate charade to lure him into her bed. When Catarina reveals her pregnancy, though, her current live-in girlfriend doesn't take to it kindly and promises to make Catarina's life hell; to make matters worse, Rafael finds out her true identity and comes to Lisbon to see her. And Catarina's sole refuge is in the arms of fellow journalist Francisco, her professional relationship slowly becoming a romantic one.

Manoel de Oliveira directs José Régio's historical epic of religious and political power struggles. King Sebastião plans to make Portugal the world's Fifth Empire.

Ricardo Monteiro is a successful television producer specialising in reality shows. He is 45 years old and he has just received an award for the most popular television show of the year, when he receives an ultimatum from his 18-year-old daughter Leonor. If he does not come home that same evening to celebrate her birthday he will never see her again. Ricardo is distracted by business or other commitments and he is too late for the last flight home. When he returns next day the apartment is empty and Leonor is gone. At first Ricardo thinks that it is only a game, but there are no phone calls or messages and after a while he gets worried and starts looking for her. He discovers that she has quit school without telling him and that she has lost all contact with her old friends. She has become a complete stranger.

A nun enjoys her bicycle.

On a Sunday an older actress (Isabel Ruth) decides to use her mobile phone to take photos of a sleeping young actor (Joaozinho Costa)

When the child Manuel wanders into a garden that is off-limits to him, he meets an unidentified fisherman, and another boy -- the boy is actually himself several years down the road. Manuel experiences three different versions of his encounters in the garden, revealing that fate can have several twists and turns in one's life, depending on decisions that are made early on.

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.

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.

In a world where society is controlled by a totalitarian regime and children are the tool of ideological formatting, Isa realizes that her child is different from the others and that this will bring consequences to her life.

Portugal 1997. A nuclear accident left the the country without energy and divided between zones, some of them interdicted because of the contamination. The economic crisis is dramatic and unemployment is almost total.

The story of Father Antonio Vieira, a 17th-century Portuguese priest who lived in Brazil and worked for better treatment of the Indians and to abolish slavery.

A blind beggar is robbed of his chest of money. The theft leads to a dramatic situation in the street where he begs every day.

In a rural landscape, that resembles an old Portugal, an elderly man find out that his wife, whom he believed to be dead, was seen shopping in town. Spiteful and sad, he wants to hide from everyone, but his friends insist that he uses this situation to become stronger and try to get married again.