Manuel Mesquita

Lisbon, Portugal, 2010. Pilar, a pious woman devoted to social causes, maintains a peculiar relationship with her neighbor Aurora, a temperamental old woman obsessed with gambling who lives tormented by a mysterious past.

A loner, narcissistic and suicidal teenager attracts most of the people he meets like a fatal aura, a black light. He falls deeply in love with Teresa but does she exist or is she a mere figment, an image, a reflection? Teresa is an apparition. A pretext for an amoral violent uprising, for doomed love.

Manuel bids farewell to his routine and boards a 15th century vessel under pirate law. Treason on board triggers a series of terrible events our protagonist overcomes while keeping his moral principles intact.

After finishing his MA in Anthropology, Hugo spends his days giving his brain a rest from the endless reading of texts by unknown authors. His only company is Luisa, the cleaning lady, with whom he plays cat and mouse. To escape the sleep of reason – which creates monsters -, Hugo exercises his lyrical vein by writing, with his friend Manuel, songs about their neighbourhood. The quiet dilettantism of our protagonist is shaken by Catarina, a young and beautiful translator who’s starting her professional life as a freelancer. Hugo is hooked and wavers. High above, a kestrel falcon hovers. It’s not the only bird of prey that can do it.

Jorge, a very shy young man, works as bellboy in a Lisbon hotel and lives in a guesthouse where he is constantly harassed by the owner’s daughter. As he tries to resist her charms, the boy dreams of one thing only: to incarnate the singer Tony de Matos. This obsession leads him to sign up for an unique karaoke contest, where he will finally be able to give life to his longtime hero. And it’s amid a group of strange characters that Jorge will understand that, after all, he is not alone.

What starts as an animal lab experiment leads, in the future, to the development of artificial beings capable of carrying out the most varied and complex of tasks. Before being delivered to their customers, the manufacturer develops a kind of final quality control test, supervised by a technician, where certain skills (like learning the customer’s language) are improved. This part of the process invariably occurs in a closed environment, usually a house with key characteristics of the customers home. Alpha is one of such artificial beings. He and Beta are a couple only a few weeks away from being shipped to their future owners in Japan.