Mônica Botelho

Rainha

When Rita fulfills her dream of becoming the carnival queen of a samba school she will have to fight against the dark forces of her internal and external world.

Deserto

A small group of artists travels the Brazilian backlands presenting a show. Upon arriving in a small village, they find an abandoned city with houses, a church, and a fountain spouting clean water, like a miracle of a biblical desert. Tired of and battered by their life as wanderers, the artists decide to settle in the village and start a new community, assigning themselves different roles from those they have played throughout their lives. This new arrangement, however, will reveal these artists the worst vices of the civilian life.

The Cause and the Shadow

In Portugal he was a priest, in Brazil a revolutionary.

I Was in Lisbon and Remembered You

"In the beginning of this project, I wanted to do a documentary film based on this book by Luiz Ruffato. However, I ended up doing a feature film with many links to documentary. I wanted to know what made Brazilians want to emigrate to Portugal. I chose working with amateur actors and non-actors in both cities, so their own life stories and experiences could be in the film. I did the other way round from the writer. He found these people and made them characters of his book. I looked for people who had similar stories to those described in the book, and made them characters of my film. When I read the book, I was seduced by its "false documentary" characteristic. The book was all written as if it was the transcription of an oral interview the writer had done in Lisbon. I decided to keep this narrative in the film, by a narration with the main character talking to the camera. It's a film about emigration. About dreams and disappointments," says Barahona