Joana Gusmão

The Metamorphosis of Birds

Filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos sifts through the memories of her ancestors. Her naval officer grandfather, Henrique, who married her grandmother, Beatriz, on her 21st birthday, spent extended periods at sea, leaving her with six children. This is the beginning of a generational saga.

Bad Bunny

Wayward boy punishes his mother’s lover. Beauty and horror fondle each other. Young gods callously abjure conventional morality. Death goes whoring in child’s guise.

Wake Up, Leviathan

T. S. Eliot ends one of his most famous poems, "The Hollow Men", by repeating three times the sentence "This is how the world ends" - and then adding: "Not with a bang but a whimper."

Trading Cities

This film tries to make a silent record of the arrival of an economy of scale, its flows, and its effects upon the transformation of an island’s physical and human landscape.

Industrial Revolution

The Ave Valley is, for more than a century, a territory seized by an imposing industry. Amongst ruins and operating factories, we descend the river on a journey alongside the banks of the present, unveiling the marks of the past.

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum

In the sixteenth century the Padrão Real hung from the ceiling of the Map Room in the Casa da Índia. It was a secret map, guarded from the eyes of foreign spies, which was changed and reworked with the comings and goings of each expedition. Aided by scientific equipment to measure distance, the navigators dreamed up the representation of the expanses that they had covered. When at sea, they looked up to the heavens and gauged their path by the stars, hands drawing in space fictional lines that carved territories. Upon returning to shore, they took the map that had previously belonged to others as their own, erasing divisive lines and constructing new borders. The map that they followed has been lost over time, and what remains of it is a stolen copy, made from memory by one of the cartographers in order to outwit enemies.

La chambre jaune

A director gathers all the pieces he needs to make his film: a set, an actor, a writer, a director of photography, a studio, a script, a director.

Cativeiro

To be captive is to be confined, both in space and in time. The captive one is not only and necessarily a prisoner, but becomes an inherent part of that space, his identity being continually projected on it. The captivity space itself is in turn not inert; it is rather characterized by whomever it contains, it is shaped by that experience.

The City and The Sun

A woman and two dogs inside a city house. She rediscovers herself in daily gestures and in the remembrance of whom has left. The sun blinds her, it becomes fierce, and like death, she cannot look it in the eye - only to the shadows around her

Fire

“There must be a different solution than the one from hell’. Full unadulterated terror (and music). 'The best class always ends with a lesson'. Almost baroque in its ambition and detail, Akerman and Seabra Lopes’ mesmerising short film delves deeply into the hard-wired dread of music lessons. Sewn around Schubert’s steely Opus 1, which is itself based on the no less terrifying legend of Goethe's Erlkönig, their film is a revelation.” International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Atelier

The atelier of the painter Gonçalo Pena merges into his work. The space's occupation is divided between the solitary and silent moments devoted to painting and the shared moments devoted to conversations with all those who visit him.