Miguel Gomes

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.

Every night, in danger of being beheaded, Scheherazade tells King Shahryar unfinished tales to continue them the following night, hence defying his promise of murdering his new wives after their wedding night. Scheherazade tells King Shahryar her stories but these are not those in the book. As in the book, these stories are tragic and comical, with rich and poor, powerless and powerful people, filled with surprising and extraordinary events.

João is an indolent young man, whose life is desperately empty. Day after day he goes through the motions of duplicating keys in his tiny shop concealed in the basement of an obsolete nearly deserted shopping center. Some day, he hopes, the lady of his heart will come and order the key that will unlock his heart. Against all expectation, the miracle happens...

Crista, Carloto and João are building an airy greenhouse for butterflies in the garden. The three of them share household routines, day after day… And they are not the only ones.

Cinema and affections from life in images and what goes on outside the frame. 'Snapshots' of shootings and the present-day memory of directors, actors and technicians.

Some of the chapters from Arabian Nights are adapted to a modern Portugal in this epic.

A young French actress in Lisbon to shoot a movie is intrigued by a nun she sees kneeling in the chapel where she is filming.

A 2008 short made in accompaniment with Our Beloved Month of August, documenting Gomes's and his crew's hapless search, during 2007's carnival, for one of Arganil's most storied and elusive characters (who does, in fact, ultimately appear as an interviewee/player in the finished film). Paulo "Miller" is known for taking a dangerous jump into the Alva from a bridge each year during carnival, but what this film is about is, in keeping with the free-roving feature, much less the subject himself than Gomes and co.'s inability to pin him down; not only does he not do his famous jump during this year's carnival, but an ostensible technical/audio failure (as with the feature, it's very difficult to say how much of this film is "fact," how much invented) during Gomes's initial on-camera meeting with Paulo "Miller" leads to five minutes of lip-readers attempting to decipher their conversation.