João Bénard da Costa

Carolina marries dredging-boat operator Antonio, but she soon becomes jealous of Antonio's interest in their goddaughter Melita, but both Carolina and Melita fancy gypsy gold salesman Ze of Gold. Passions, jealousy, and long-buried secrets begin to surface.

Francisco, behave! I Know it's your birthday, you are thirty now, it's carnival, you've dressed as a cowboy for the school party and you are surrounded by kids you hate. But that's no reason to be so annoying... Francisco, repeat after me: "Up to your 30's you have the face God has given you. After that, you get the face you deserve". (imdb)

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.

A special surreal encounter between Nikita Khrouchtchev and the Pope John XXIII. (imdb)

Some of the chapters from Arabian Nights are adapted to a modern Portugal in this epic. (imdb)

Documentary about the life of Portuguese film critic, essayist and cinephile João Bénard da Costa.

In the beginning was the end: a funeral, a crashed car. Gradually we see signs of extreme violence, which reveals an absence. Rumors are heard, nightmares of a child. An atmosphere of apathetic despair gradually forms. We enter a kind of 'zone', a place out of the world, a non-place, a limbo close to post-apocalyptic. (Curtas Vila do Conde)

An impossible love. Two young people in love. Vera and John can't find a space nor time, nor identity in this life that can solve this love. Apparently everything is beneficial to them, their families, friends and the land where they live. The issue is time. The time they don't actually have (studies, families, distant houses) and the time of their own life. (Letterboxd)

A story about art and educated men, and how their art and culture reveal themselves useless in the face of the harsh realities of the 20th century life.