Lia Gama

A theatre having national as part of its name, at the top of a square, reflecting a country’s history. But which one? This is a voyage through the various narratives about D. Maria II National Theatre, forged through the intentions of the several regimes that intended to convey their own ideologies within the theatre’s mission. This is also the story of those who fought against it, opposed the institution and became part of it. How can one become heir of these stories, even if never having set foot inside.

A look at the urban society of the seventies. The story of Marta a young and pretty girl, who leaves her husband to search for her true identity. She doesn't quite know what she wants, but at least she knows what she's escaping from. Soon she encounters financial difficulties and finds herself involved with shady characters, a situation that leads to a mysterious murder. The net closes around her.

In an empty theatre, a woman is watching an American film - "Ma's Sin" - which tells the weird revenge story of a middle-aged wife, driven mad by jealousy and a deep feer of dying. During the screening, the viewer's fantasies embodied in male characters harass her. Thus she will live the double adventure of the projected motion picture and of her own mental film. But as the lights turn on, she leaves the theatre, apparently unaffected.

The life of a young man, son of an English officer who lets himself become a prisoner of love resulting in fatalism and disgrace.

Once the boss started deducting a third of the workers' wages on the pretext that it was necessary to purchase new machines in order to compete, a group of workers went on strike, occupied the company, but were expelled from their workplace by the police. Out on the street, the workers think about the best way to make their comrades and the general population aware of the seriousness of their situation. They then decide, by mutual agreement, following the humorous tradition of cegadas and popular theater, to improvise a satirical performance in which they denounce some typical examples of capitalist exploitation. From the bandstand, which serves as their rehearsal stage, to the final procession, which unexpectedly takes on a different tone, the workers learn and teach us how scathing and uncompromising criticism of capitalist institutions can be transformed into a celebration of struggle, joy, and unity.

A film adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel "Hard Times" set in a Portuguese industrial town of the 1980s.

After her mother's death, Sofia returns from a Swiss college to her family's luxurious villa, in Cascais. Through the relashionship between her father, Henrique, and his lover Laura, she will discover the complexity, egothistic, discrete and hypocrite way of life - from which there is no escape.

In 1974, not long after the death of Portuguese dictator Salazar, who had ruled Portugal from the early '30s to the late '60s, a group of disgruntled Army officers held a coup. They were even more disgruntled when they realized how the coup was being manipulated by leftist officers to instigate genuine elections and establish a constitution for the first time in Portuguese history. Though their intent was to form a radical socialist state, circumstances prevented this, and a genuine parliamentary democracy emerged. This film explores the circumstances of a right-wing businessman during those times. The man is an old-fashioned authoritarian, whose attentiveness to the needs of his mistress, wife and son is crude where it exists at all.

A story about doomed love between two people from different worlds and the impact in their lives.

"Kilas" (a Portuguese misrepresentation of the English word "killers") is the nickname of a petty con-man who gets involved with a deadly ring of spies.

Daniel had a plan, a sort of journal of the future, written in a notebook. Sometimes he went back to rectify small things, but still, life seemed pretty easy and happiness too. But, all of a sudden, everything changed for the worse: Portugal collapsed and Daniel lost his job. He couldn't afford to pay the mortgage for his house any more. His wife, also unemployed, left with his children, searching for better opportunities.

This exaggerated mockery of crime cinema tells the story of a gang lead by "Renato, o pacíficio" (Renato, the peaceful) and their attempt to steal precious jewels from the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. The weapon of choice? Bees!

Sonia and Branca are two close friends at their thirties's sexual peak, on the verge of their cosmopolitan loneliness. Despite the long relationship that keeps them together, they are so distant, that it's as if they didn't really know each other. Cronica Feminina (Women's Tales) is a dramatic comedy that talks about women, but essentially approaches, from the point of view of its characters, the human need to communicate, seduce, fantasize, the need for love in the bottom of all things

A boy in Lisbon, in this Lisbon in permanent renovation.

Luís - ex-student in Lisbon and ex-combatant in Africa - finds, after returning, Maria, secretary who has a relationship with António. He lives in a palace with his children, two old aunts and a Dominican friar, a former missionary.

Ricardo Monteiro is a successful television producer specialising in reality shows. He is 45 years old and he has just received an award for the most popular television show of the year, when he receives an ultimatum from his 18-year-old daughter Leonor. If he does not come home that same evening to celebrate her birthday he will never see her again. Ricardo is distracted by business or other commitments and he is too late for the last flight home. When he returns next day the apartment is empty and Leonor is gone. At first Ricardo thinks that it is only a game, but there are no phone calls or messages and after a while he gets worried and starts looking for her. He discovers that she has quit school without telling him and that she has lost all contact with her old friends. She has become a complete stranger.

In his childhood haunts, in the village of Várzea dos Amarelos, the filmmaker films peasant life with its seasonal and daily rituals: a festive meal, the slaughter of a pig, bread-making. The film slides into imagination and blends with fiction: memories and dreams, imagination and reality intermingle in this work full of enthusiasm that has an enormous freedom of form and a zest for life and discovery of the world. With a strong documentary element, it mixes professional actors with the inhabitants of a small village, telling the story of a small film crew in a village living day to day.

World peace is at stake if a spy-ring obtains the electronic device

Alexandra Lencastre plays a woman who believes she is President of the U.S.A.

Combining newsreel footage, still photographs, interviews, and analytical narration, this documentary focuses on the antifascist, anti-imperialist efforts of labor groups, peasants, and working-class soldiers to liberate Portugal from the control of the government of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

In Lisbon, French author Paul meets various people from his past who uncover forgotten memories.

A small village in Portugal, Águas-Altas, is being sued by a Spanish multinational corporation because the village hosts a website that uses the same name as an international brand of mineral water. A judicial battle for website begins, that quickly turned in to a media circus. Thus the residents of this small village, who are not even sure what the internet is, are forced defend their website and their villages honour.

A young man from a high-bourgeois family, Henrique receives mysterious phone calls from a woman at the barracks where he is serving in the military, which attracts him to meetings without consequences.

Alentejo, Portugal, 1950. In a desolate region, where the wind seems to speak, where misery and hunger reign over poorest, a desperate man takes his revenge on those who caused his ruin during the darkest night, unable to get honestly the bread needed to feed his family in the daylight.

In Lisbon 1950, John, 13, decides to invade the neighborhood of prostitutes, nobility and sailors, starting a new stage in his life. Today this neighborhood is reflected in a scattered public debate centered on its night life.

Filmed just before the Carnation Revolution of 1974. Dark portrait of a group of friends who used to be colleagues at the University in 1962. Ten years later, they have lost all their ideals. With Lisbon on the background they discuss politics, love, culture; each of them has reached a deadlock. The camera remains still while it registers the dissolution of their dreams.

The film of a performance of a selection of cabaret comedy sketches by Karl Valentin, with Jorge Silva Melo as stage director. The show was a complete success and has become almost legendary. Solveig Nordlund shot it, adding some more sketches that weren’t included on the show.

Mário and Cláudia are going through a divorce process. When Cláudia accepts job in another country, situation will lead parents to reassess many of their certainties and question the effects on the happiness of their children.

Concerns an Irish woman, Cathy (Pauline Cadell), who dearly loves her Portuguese lawyer husband, Pedro (Rui Morisson); however, unbeknownst to her, he engages in one tryst after another. Cathy soon finds herself trying to help a young delinquent get off heroin, while the youth's desperate mother joins a weird religious cult. In other segments, an elderly man is nearly driven mad with grief at the loss of his granddaughter in a train station, while a down-and-out jeweler ushers the young girl to a hotel room.

This is the look that the film about Eduardo Gageiro takes. A film that departs from the stories of two images and that moves on crossing them with the ones that come out of the construction of his latest book. A film that shows how the deep Portuguese look of this photographer has seen the transformations of his country and of the world in the last 60 years. A look that has imagined what the photographer has seen and shot: the kiss of Maria to Salazar’s dead body in 1970, the kidnapping of the Israeli during the 1972 Olympic Games, the turning-point in the 74 revolution and the seductive revelations of the portraits from 1995.

An adaptation of the renowned Portuguese Letters, originally written in French and attributed to Soror Mariana Alcoforado. As letters may have been written by Soror, in the Convent of Nossa Senhora da Conceição in Beja, to her lover Noel Bouton, Count of Chamilly.

A man exiled in Paris makes various trips to Portugal after the Carnation Revolution. Each trip is represented by a woman.

Short documentary film by Lauro António.