Paulo Rocha

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.

A Portuguese officer returns back home in 1885, after a voluntary exile in Mozambique. He finds his sister Francisca and his mistress Isabel. Threatened with bored in the everyday life, Moraes leaves, in Macao this time, when he starts a family with a chinese woman. Then, in 1895, he settles down as consul to Kobé, where he marries a Japanese, O-Yone. In the death of this one, his niece, Ko-Haru, replaces over. (mubi.com)

19-year-old Julio moves from the countryside to Lisbon, trying to earn a living as a shoemaker. But this new urban environment feels very strange and distressing to him, and will lead him to unpredictable extremes.

Genre: the new portuguese cinema. A story of relationships and nonconformism. The struggle between a man and the sea, between tradition and progress. A fishing village. The sea gradually conquering the land. A fisherman returns from the war in Africa. He is challenged to change his life.

João is the spiritual heir (the term he prefers to bastard) of Manuel Brandão, his dying godfather, and at the same time the political leader of a small party of a disintegrating governmental coalition. (imdb)

This film, made as a "twin" of A ilha dos amores, was planned as a poetic documentary on the enigmatic life of Wenceslau de Moraes (1855-1929), the great Portuguese writer who lived in the Far East. Verbal testimony, photographs, manuscripts, and images of Lisbon, Macao, Kobe, and Tokushima in Moraes' time are set side by side with A ilha dos amores and with de Moraes' writings. The director, Paulo Rocha, visited places where Moraes was still remembered and interviewed the writer's descendants..