Duarte de Almeida

A 'double-bill' of two discrete narratives, concerning a cherubic infant killer and a neurotic Norman Bates-like loner: when, as the second plot develops, one has all but forgotten the first, it brusquely resurfaces. (filmlinc.com)

Lisbon, 1989. A poor devil, middle aged, lives in a room in cheap lodgings on the old outlying districts of town. Tortured by illness and by several vicissitudes, the idiot - who survives on Schubert and a vague fondness for cinema as a form of resistance to poverty - is thrown out into the street after he tries to seduce the daughter of the owner of the lodgings... Silver Lion at the Venice Festival, "Recollections of the Yellow House" brought renown to the director on an international scale.

The journey of Michael Padovic, an American professor who arrives with his wife, Helene, at a Portuguese convent where he expects to find the documents needed to prove his theory: Shakespeare was born in Spain; not in England. (imdb)

A prelude announces the intent to tell nine stories, all marked with letters of alphabet, with the subsequent permutations of these stories. Not only the plotlines get mutated and re-ordered, so do the actors, hats, beards, accents, manners - whatever may identify a character ceases to be such an identifier. The plot itself becomes a mystery, since there are parallel searches for the treasure, the map of treasure, which as we learn is a treasure in itself, a coin, a kidnapped father etc.

Several hikers become lost in the woods.