Refinaria Filmes

"In the beginning of this project, I wanted to do a documentary film based on this book by Luiz Ruffato. However, I ended up doing a feature film with many links to documentary. I wanted to know what made Brazilians want to emigrate to Portugal. I chose working with amateur actors and non-actors in both cities, so their own life stories and experiences could be in the film. I did the other way round from the writer. He found these people and made them characters of his book. I looked for people who had similar stories to those described in the book, and made them characters of my film. When I read the book, I was seduced by its "false documentary" characteristic. The book was all written as if it was the transcription of an oral interview the writer had done in Lisbon. I decided to keep this narrative in the film, by a narration with the main character talking to the camera. It's a film about emigration. About dreams and disappointments," says Barahona

Alentejo, Portugal, 1950. In a desolate region, where the wind seems to speak, where misery and hunger reign over poorest, a desperate man takes his revenge on those who caused his ruin during the darkest night, unable to get honestly the bread needed to feed his family in the daylight.

Lucas, the cook, seduces America, the television star and presidential candidate. He will clandestinely enter her house to seduce her with extraordinary meals, causing the unlikely intersection of the fate of Lucas, the cook, with that of America, the President.

Nheengatu – The Language of the Amazon takes us on a journey along the Negro River, on the trail of this language imposed on indigenous people by the first Portuguese colonialists who landed in Brazil in the 15th century. Throughout the various encounters with local communities that still speak this language, the director faces the different cultural, historical and social issues that confront tradition and future.

Inspired on the true events of the Portuguese king Don Pedro (14th Century) which unburied his mistress to make her queen after dead. This film tells the story of Pedro, a man admitted to a psychiatric hospital for traveling by car with the corpse of his beloved, recalling simultaneously three different lives: one from the past, another from nowadays and another one from an distopic future.

Mid-19th century. A group of survivors from a wrecked slave ship, both black and white, end up on a deserted island, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. The fight for survival and power will flip the moral and social values of those days.

It is said that there is a lost manuscript by Fradique Mendes in a monastery in Cairu, a small city located south of Salvador.

Eden's Ark is a journey through the dramatic, chaotic, precarious world of botany and film preservation. A journey in danger and poetry, across the ice and the tropics, following adventurers and preservers, and confronting what we lose and save.