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.
Dr. Ivan has found two radical cures for unhappiness: the diagnosis of fake terminal cancers and the temporary elimination of some of the 5 senses. But will the therapies result or will they have unforeseeable side effects?
Having lost her place among the social elite, a widow remarries and starts a family.
The Nun's Kaddish is a short film that portrays a true story of inter-religious kindness when a Nun observes a Jewish ritual, raising the spirituality of the two faiths towards a higher ...
A triptych of short stereoscopic films by Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard and Edgar Pêra. Includes "The Three Disasters" by Godard, "Cinesapiens" by Pêra and "Just in Time" by Greenaway.
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.
“An old photograph taken 36 years ago. His hand rests on my shoulder. A blessing, a gift. Then a history of over four decades of friendship, admiration and apprenticeship. A journey into Oliveira’s cinema, his method, his way of filming and his extraordinary cinematic inventions. He lived for over a century, over a century of cinema, cinema in its entirety. For him, and for me too now, documentary and fiction films go hand in hand; it is all about cinema. So I had the audacity to film a magnificent story that Manoel loved but never filmed, one that he left behind as if his hand and eyes were close to God, or among the gods, and he was steering me.” - João Botelho
In 2016, Edgar Pêra released The Amazing Spectator, a playful investigation into cinema’s disquieting essence that had everything from negative film images of boobs and positively splendid interviews to a donkey hand puppet. The film and an accompanying book formed his PhD thesis. But as so often with him, projects turn into obsessions – especially when there are masses of notions not pondered, thoughts not elaborated upon. And so KINORAMA - Beyond the Walls of Cinema was born, a stand-alone continuation of The Amazing Spectator that looks at cinema’s future in cyberspace and, accordingly, perhaps the end of its enslavement to figurative representation, the 'stupid sacred in narrative cinema' (to use a Pêra’ism), realism and artificiality in 3D cinema, and many other aspects.
Based on the installation Santa Paz Domestica, Domesticada by Ana Vieira (1977) and excerpts from the September 22nd, 1956 issue of the magazine O Cruzeiro.
Free adaptation of Sophocles classic tragedy “King Oedipus” crossed with Jack Kerouac's classic “On the Road”. The starting point is the loss of identity of a generation of Portuguese emigrants. Tebas tells the story of a young man who, looking for his origins, departs from Paris to Portugal with a beatnik truck driver. The film is a voyage into the strange depths of Portugal in the form of surreal road-movie.
A boy and a girl fall in love. But on the night they met, she was drunk and stoned and he took advantage of her. Although she does not remember almost anything from that night, she remembers something that may compromise their relationship.
Five low-life people find themselves trapped in a public toilet.
Maria spends her days working in her family’s noisy metal factory. While being oppressed by male violence, she is also responsible for caring for her sister-in-law and niece, both existentially depleted. A revolution starts to boil within her.
Four people meet during a train trip up the Douro Valley.
An act of passion, filmed in a church turned into a bar, on Easter 2003, and starring as many actors as the days of the year… Taking the sacred painting as a reference, the film questions the human condition: letting oneself die like Christ or betray scientifically like Peter?
Fragments of light and shade in the lives of a truck driver spiraling downward, his caring wife and their oblivious daughter.