Anna Leppänen

A story about art and educated men, and how their art and culture reveal themselves useless in the face of the harsh realities of the 20th century life.

Sofia is a film where we see unfolding fears, misunderstandings, prejudices, cravings and desires, all these feelings appearing and disappearing between the lines of the unsaid. A beautiful look at our precarious human condition.

Roberto is one of those men to whom simulation has become the greatest art. He is an unmoved, inscrutable, mysterious man. But the truth is that Robert feels an intimate, deep tedium. The boredom of those who have already exhausted all the pleasures of life. The only thing still surprising him is the fact that nothing surprises him anymore. One evening he has an overwhelming encounter with a woman. For his own bewilderment, he discovers the sublime horrors in which the woman has sank.

Jorge de Sena was forced to leave his country. First he moved to Brazil, and later to the USA. He never returned to Portugal. During his 20-year-long exile, he kept an epistolary correspondence with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. These letters are a testimony of the profound friendship between the two poets, letters of longing and of desire to “fill years of distance with hours of conversation”. Through excerpts and verses, a dialog is established, revealing their divergent opinions but mostly their strong bond, and their efforts to preserve it until their last breaths.

Two friends promise that they will never grow up and that if they do, one day, they will end their own lives. Between the day of the promise and the day adulthood arrives, anxieties and fears, hopes and dreams make it difficult to reach the age of thirty. Reaching the milestone, after all, is as good as it is scary. Perhaps running away to Paris is the solution, but, as the conclusion goes, "we are all heroes at midnight, but cowards at nine in the morning." Does growing up mean compromising? Or do we remain just a little lost children playing this game of wanting to appear very adult?

Adília was once a successful pianist. Now her only contact point with the world is her daughter.