Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

An omnibus project examining, well, the state of the world.

A 70-year-old man is in a relationship with a young man named Heiko. It is a fetishist relationship taken to extreme exoticism.

This visually striking drama is taken from the classic Japanese novel Tales Of Genji by Marasaki Shikibu. Set in modern Portugal, Joao (Luis Miguel Cintra) is a left-wing political leader and ladies man with a bright future. His ex-wife Isabel (Manuela de Freitas) both loves and hates him as Joao plays on her wavering emotional state. He is sent to Italy to retrieve wayward family member Antonia (Caroline Chaniolleau), the beautiful young woman with a terrorist boyfriend. Joao is forced to recognize his feelings as the political and amorous climate changes around him.

Set four years after the Portuguese revolution and the simultaneous loss of the Portuguese empire in Africa, the story concerns a director who sells guns to finance his play.

Nino, tough but sickly, and his older brother Vicente live in the country with their father. After their father disappears ― we’re never sure why ― murder is suggested. Vicente brings his girlfriend to the house, and a different kind of family is established as the three youngsters grow fiercely protective of each other. But their uncle grows suspicious about the fate of the missing father and forcibly kidnaps Nino, taking him away to the city and leaving Vicente to locate him there.

UM CORPO DE DANÇA is a proposal for the history of the body, showed through the path of the biggest Portuguese dance company of the 20th century. The documentary follows the rise of dance in Portugal along with the country’s political, economic and sociocultural ongoings as background. It is the story of a transforming body that frees itself from a fascist dictatorship, and of a changing society that opens itself to the world. From unreleased archive images and interviews with several creators and dancers, we follow the path of an extraordinary dance company through the movements and words of its protagonists, from creation in the early 1960s to its extinction in 2005.

Abel, 47 years old, two wars - in the colonies and France, emigration - several scars from many battles lost, returns in a jump to Portugal, to his lost village in the northern interior, near the border, from where one day he'd be gone, also from a jump. A letter, from his brother Peter, warned him that everything changed. Even Teresa. Abel catches sight of his childhood in the village hills, the old tribe. From a distance everything seams to be in the same placesa, the old dog is all that remains of the past. In the village the Act of Passion will be performed and Teresa is one of the participants. Abel takes the old gestures and prepares his plan: eliminate one by one Teresa's suitors, to consummate during the act of the Passion, her death ...

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.

The film presents us with a reflection on the Spanish Civil War in the Portuguese society, At a time when Salazar ruled.

In Africa, during the colonial war, a patrol is lost in the bush and a soldier dies in operation. Twelve years later, in Portugal, the soldier family meets in peace.

The film was to be a documentary, but evolved during production to a fictional film. It nevertheless adheres strictly to the poems and letters exchanged by two of the most outstanding names of the Modernist Movement, Fernando Pessoa (in Lisbon) and Mário de Sá-Carneiro (in Paris). Their endless conversation was dramatically and suddenly terminated.

Cape Verde, 1964. At the feet of a mighty volcano, the traditional Cape Verdean society is undergoing a steady change. The old land-owning aristocracy is disintegrating. A class of "mulattos" begins to emerge, with a trade-based financial power that threatens the landlords. A new identity arises, a mix of old and new, of African and Portuguese culture, sensual and dynamic. The songs of Cesária Évora follow this inevitable transformation. From the novel by Henrique Teixeira de Sousa.

In the summer of 1870, Raquel, who owns a farm, and lives secluded in her mansion with an old butler and a handful of servants, feels proud when an odd acquaintance comes by. Adriana and her daughter-in-law, Ermesinda, a very young girl, just happen to be visiting - the second time in 15 years for Adriana, and the first time for the teenager Ermesinda. The meeting seems to be pleasant, and yet, for reasons untold, there is coldness and reserve between Adriana and Raquel. Their ambiguous relationship will be revealed, when by accident old wounds are reopened.

The young girl, Antónia Margarida Castelo Branco, is handed over by her mother to Brás Telles de Meneses because of the obscure interests between rural aristocratic families in the North. Brás is a ruined man, a bohemian with a reputation for violence and erratic behaviour. Antonia’s fortune is the first sacrifice made by the young wife. Fascinated by the man who humiliates and ill-treats her, she follows him in a pilgrimage to increasingly barren lands, to increasingly less hospitable houses.

On January 21, 1975, in a village in the north of Portugal, a child writes to his parents who are in Angola to tell them how sad Portugal is. On July 13, 2011, in Milan, an old man remembers his first love. On May 6, 2012, in Paris, a man tells his baby daughter that he will never be a real father. During a wedding ceremony on September 3, 1977 in Leipzig, the bride battles against a Wagner opera that she can’t get out of her head. But where and when have these four poor devils begun searching for redemption?

The film's starting point was an exhibit at the Centre of Modern Art (Gulbenkian) in Lisbon. By evoking a time in the past and the adventures of the artist's generation, Silva Melo is able to depict the oeuvre and the artistic persona of António Palolo.

Freely based on Gide ('Paludes') and Hawthorne ('Wakefield'), this is a film about a writer who never wrote anything and who blows at nightfall the breath of frost. The poem by Carlos Queiroz to which the above sentences belong is not cited in 'O som da Terra a Tremer', but the atmosphere is that, between written letters never received. Fiction within fiction, stories within stories, like those Chinese boxes in which there is always one inside another. Or the two margins of the same river, always being lateral.

This documentary portrait covers all the themes of Daveau’s rich life: from her field research and private life to feminism and the influence of the modern age on family relationships and science. Her passionate life is examined in detail in an inexhaustible series of stunning archival photos and home videos recorded by Daveau, and in voice-over she speaks openly, extensively and full of wonder about life and the world around her.

“The artist, in his movement towards the ideal, upsets the stability of any one society. Society aspires to achieve stability; the artist aims for infinity. That is the artist’s responsibility and the spiritual sacrifice demanded of him.” Rui Chafes, O Perfume das Buganvílias, 2012 (19).

Developing from an idea of diptych, the story of Anajara and Allison is told from two perspectives in continuity. If late night work complicates the life of one of them, the incarceration in jail of the other determines a cycle of separation. Salaviza's skill to direct amateur actors is showed in this film, one of his more precise works.