Paulo Guilherme

Miracles still happen—or so they say… What is the place of the sacred in the contemporary world? Looking again at a myth that haunts us, that of Saint Anthony of Lisbon (and also of Padua), through the timeless painting of Goya, 13 Alfinetes is a story of love, revenge, and blood. It begins with a reenactment of an episode supposedly occurring in medieval Lisbon, filtered through the cosmopolitan 18th-century Madrid, and returning to Lisbon today, where miracles, in truth, no longer happen.

In mid-September 1992, journalist Guida Fontes have to go to Luanda to cover the elections in Angola. In the meantime, she had committed herself to discovering and interviewing the poet Júlio Vera. In 1988, he wrote a series of poems in which he mysteriously anticipated the fall of the USSR. Guida has only 12 days to complete the mission.

Set in the Lisbon during the festivities of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lovers and the old town. The story is about Cato, a nationalist politician who is charismatic and unscrupulous. He obsessively pursues Silvia, a mystical and mysterious young transvestite whom he meets at the festival. When Silvia runs into Vicente, a policeman who arrests transvestites and threatens them, Silvia must look towards blackmail to save herself. Compromising photos of Cato start to emerge among opposition parties and he must do all in his power to save his political career.

The short life of the Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini is colourfully portrayed, not as a conventional biopic, but as a visual poem which evokes the turbulent life and complex personality of the literary heroine as she develops her genius for writing.

Paulo works as night security in a deactivated industrial complex. He lost his daughter in dramatic circumstances, and no regrets would console him. He sleeps at Luisa's house and witnesses the repeated transgressions of an unstable neighbour. Everything threatens to crack.