Ruy Furtado

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 story about doomed love between two people from different worlds and the impact in their lives.

In a mental institution the patients see themselves as people like Jesus, Lázaro, Marta, Maria, Adão, Eve, Sonia, Raskolnikov, Aliosha e Ivan Karamasov, a Philosopher, a Profet, Santa Teresa d'Avila, reciting the Divine Comedy. (imdb)

Doc lives on the edge of Europe where it imperceptibly slides over into the Third World. As a doctor, he knows that the illness he has contracted ten years before in war-torn Africa is getting worse. The diagnosis is cholera, but Doc Knows the disease's real name: despair. His thoughts about his failed struggle for justice and ideals are drowned regularly in alcohol. (imdb)

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.

A Portuguese family is in mourning over the loss of one of their sons, a young man who was killed in Mozambique. During the mid-1970s, Mozambique rebelled against 450 years of Portuguese colonial domination and after much bloodshed, independence was declared in June, 1975. Now 10 years have gone by and the mother still cannot forget her dead son, though the topic of the war has long been dropped from conversations.

A Portuguese adaptation of the classic Charles Dickens novel.