Northern Portugal. An imposing residence with its garden and magnolia tree. As we know, home is a place that film, this outdoor art, has often used to depict less the joys of family life than a pernicious space. André Gil Mata has made it his stage, with its rooms, its furniture, what plays out there and what has already played out there. From one room to another, from one era to another, the film delves deep into this enclosed space, a kind of suffocating box.

A man, a child, two wars, a river, a tree. A man and a child meet under a tree on a river bank, sharing the same memory and a secret. They find in each other the serenity, the silence and the time they lost in the flowing water of the river.

In Sarajevo, in a cinema’s projection booth, lives Sena; a woman who in daily solitude repeats the projection of the few Yugoslavian films of which there are copies. Through a combination of silence, the everyday gestures of this woman and the films that are projected from her living room, comes a film built like a day in Sena’s life. Through the films that Sena projects, we are taken on a journey in both collective and personal memory. The film offers a portrait of intimacy crossed with a history witnessed by cinema; a history which Sena has conserved.

Ubu, instigated by his wife, murders King Venceslau and usurps the throne of Poland. Intoxicated by power, this grotesque and coward character conducts his reign in an absurd and cruel way, leading his kingdom to ruin. A cinematographic adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s play, a political satire that, cyclically, turns to the reality of world politics.

Inspired by popular cult, O COVEIRO is part light part darkness, a bedtime story and almost a nightmare. A child is born and his parents die of fright just to see him. André Gil Mata revisits the traditional Portuguese tale, in a fantastic movie where heads bounce, but you hear a song.

In a lake surrounded by buildings, a man builds a boat.

In an ominous Lisbon courtyard where the last executioner of the kingdom once lived, an accident is waiting to happen. After a patient game of who's observing who, four characters will collide with dire consequences. Inspired by the novel The Damned Yard by Nobel Prize-winning Bosnian writer Ivo Andrić, this is a masterclass in slow cinema, a pure 16mm cinematic pleasure by André Gil Mata.

To be captive is to be confined, both in space and in time. The captive one is not only and necessarily a prisoner, but becomes an inherent part of that space, his identity being continually projected on it. The captivity space itself is in turn not inert; it is rather characterized by whomever it contains, it is shaped by that experience.

A grandmother and the house where she always lived.