Tag Archives: portuguese

Bored by spending the summer in the city, 15-year-old Rita decides to take a fancy to her new neighbor, a photographer who is setting up an exhibit of his shots in Melanesia. What starts as a game turns into a blazing crush and Rita can’t distinguish between reality and fantasy anymore.
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1978. While the military coup that assaulted Brazil in 1964 starts to teeter, we follow a romance involving an 18 years old soldier and the cultural ringleader of an anarchist cabaret. Tattoo depicts the conflicts and reflections of a whole generation observed from a marginal perspective. Through the vantage point of the exception, the film elucidates the norm.
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All seems lost. And then, in an old, lonely and icy park two shadowy figures meet: those of Deus and a Messenger from God. The Messenger gives the crook (the temporary state of poor João de Deus) a suitcase stuffed with money. His mission accomplished, the Messenger leaves. João counts the bank notes. The silent waters of a nearby lake are disturbed when a heavy object plunges in. João goes to see what is happening. A young girl (Joana) is drowning. João throws himself into the water and carries the unconscious Joana off to a convent (Capucines?). How Responsible! João de Deus returns to the park to recover the case and its precious contents: happily, nothing has been touched…
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After Flamenco (1995) and Tango (1998) – nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 2005 Carlos Saura completes his trilogy on modern urban song with Fados. After over two years of research into the subject, Carlos Saura takes an enormous step forward in his approximation to music. If, in his earlier musicals, Iberia, Flamenco, Tango…, he based his work on dancing, in Fados he makes a special effort with the plot and image to reflect the birth of a suburban, dockland music which is in itself a synthesis of all of the music born towards the end of the 19th century.
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This Portuguese drama examines the daily life minutiae and intrigues of two scions of society in the rural village where they live. One is a wealthy landowner, the other a widowed aristocrat who lives in a world of her own. “Starting off from a fine novel by Carlos de Oliveira, Fernando Lopes doesn’t so mush reconstitute a story, but rather defines an atmosphere parallel to that which exists in the literary work. The erosion of time, the crumbling of an epoch, the decline of a stately home, the disintegration of emotions: the film version of A Bee in the Rain talks about all these things, using a language that is sparse and unpolished, fascinating and at the same time repulsive in its disturbing silence” (Lauro Antonio).
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After the structural collapse at a construction site, Paulo loses his job because he denounces the situation to the authorities. His relationship with his wife deteriorates more every day. Anabela, Paulo’s sister, lives with their father, who suffers from post-war syndrome from his involvement in the Colonial Wars. Bela is his nurse, and the only comfort for a terminally ill patient.
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Until you turn 30, you have the face God gave you. After that, you have the face you deserve.” The estranged musical comedy that is Gomes’ first feature film seeks to convince its protagonist, Francisco, of that saying/dogma; precisely, during his thirtieth birthday. Or maybe it’s the complete opposite, and that Francisco who dresses up as a cowboy for the school play at the school where he teaches the children he detests, seeks to convince A cara que mereces of the fatality of the little phrase. But Francisco is a trick: he knows he deserves his face and his body because of him being intolerable. And A cara que mereces, hunted hunter, becomes a claustrophobic film that seeks to run away from Francisco using cinephilia as a way of escape; boarding, as Mark Peranson has observed, to the heart of Rivette, to the train (of dreams) of the recent Godard and, finally, to an impossible (but well-deserved) version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
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Every year, four ex-soldiers who call themselves “Os Imortais” (“The Immortals”), get together with four women to celebrate their war deeds and remember the old days, back in the war. On the summer of 1985, tired of their monotonous lives, they decide to rob a bank. Joaquim Malarranha, a chief inspector from the local police force who is about to retire, crosses their path and chooses to spend his last days of duty trying to solve the robbery. But as he carries on with his investigation, he discovers more than he could have ever imagined…
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A well-educated, urban family inherits an old country house located in a small village deep in Portugal’s countryside. Upon their arrival they try to adapt themselves to the new lifestyle, but they soon learn that the village is overshadowed by superstition, religion and mysterious folklore. Strange events soon begin happening and as they learn more about the history of their family, they slowly begin to believe the rumors heard throughout the village: by inheriting the house, they also inherited a curse.
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Aged 13, Maria Noronha is an estremely pale and fragil girl, sick with tubercolosis. In order to alleviate her suffering, she gathers poppies from her garden, and at night puts them on the pillows on her bed. But the poppies have a devastating effect. Her deep sleep is disturbed by terrible ghosts and hallucinations: about the decadence of the Portuguese XVII century, the Jesuits’s power and the terrible Inquisition.
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Real estate broker and former boxer enters an old cinema in the decadent downtown São Paulo and meets an intriguing and mysterious woman, very much alike the leading lady of the film. He gets involved with her and her problems and in no time is being accused of a crime.
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A businessman on the verge of bankruptcy receives an unexpected inheritance: a large farm in Portugal’s southern province of Alentejo. But what seems to be his salvation turns out to be his doom. Fascinated by the story of violence committed by his ancestors, the previous owners of the estate, he becomes wrapped up in a hurricane of situations and sensations previously unknown to him.
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The story a famous Brazilian criminal, called The Red Light Bandit because he always used a red flashlight to break in the houses during the night. Working alone, he also used to rape his female victims.
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In 1925, Gabriela becomes cook, mistress, and then wife of Nacib, a bar owner in a small Brazilian coastal town runs by the local colonels. Nacib becomes tired of Gabriela’s uneducated ways, and annuls the marriage when he finds her in bed with his friend Tonico. The political ways of the town modernize slightly and Gabriela returns as Nacib’s mistress.
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Gracinda, a young laundry washer, lives with her godfather, “Uncle” Jacinto, and together they run a family business, doing the laundry for residents of Lisbon in their small village in the outskirts of that city (Canecas). Unfortunately, the business is not going very well, but that changes when Gracinda decides to go to the city to try to convince Chico, “Uncle” Jacinto’s son, with whom she is in love, to return to the village and give new life to the business. The village is preparing for the annual festivities and a dispute erupts between “Uncle” Jacinto and his business rival , the widow Quiteria, when each of them invites different bands to play at the same time during the party and dances.
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