Francisco Tavares

A regular family living in the outskirts of Lisbon sees the serenity of their lives shaken beyond any remedy within a week.

An isolated air traffic controller in a small island of the Azores archipelago is contacted by a lone pilot cut helplessly adrift over the North Atlantic.

This is the story of a young Mozambican footballer called Eusébio, a gifted athlete destined to great achievements, coveted by rival clubs, Sporting and Benfica, which ends up hiring him. Blackmail, kidnapping attempts, ministers involved, press hysteria and huge money offers make the story of this football transfer into a saga evolving between the two continents. It ends up when the legend begins: with Eusébio’s first match at the Benfica Stadium.

Álvaro and Jaime, two childhood friends in their twenties, share a particularly critical view of the functioning of society in all its dimensions. Spending much of the day as a video club clerk in order to get some financial income and get around the difficulty they feel in entering into the game of professional careers and status - a refusal that is a personal commitment for them - the two main characters they are plotting a suburb diary. While they understand the nonsense of the existence of a videoclub, at a time when the proliferation of the Internet facilitates access to the contents available there, the two main characters engage in a parallel business selling the herb, using the establishment like facade. The process passes without the knowledge of the owner of the video club, an individual at the end of middle age with a total disinterest for cinema.

George, an agoraphobic young woman, cannot go more than 522 steps away from her home. One day, a personal tragedy forces her to embark on a journey from Spain to her native Portugal. Along the way, George's whole world begins to widen…

Paris, March 1939. While the march of the Nazi troops makes itself heard throughout Europe, exiled artists and intellectuals from all over the world still converge in the French capital. Portuguese composer Fernando Lopes-Graça is among them, sharing this cosmopolitan environment, on the verge of rupture. A happy coincidence brings him into the presence of the man he considers his master, the intransigent Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. For Lopes-Graça, the occasion presents itself as a unique opportunity to show Bartók his scores...

Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest writers in Portuguese, created an immense parallel world and several heteronyms so as to endure the loneliness of genius. José Saramago, 1998 Nobel Laureate in Literature, has a heteronym, Ricardo Reis, return to Portugal after a 16-year exile in Brazil. 1936 is a perilous year with Mussolini’s fascism, Hitler’s Nazism, Spain’s Civil War and Salazar’s New State in Portugal. And Fernando Pessoa meets his creation, Reis. Two women, Lídia and Marcenda, are Reis’ carnal and impossible passions. “Life and Death as one” allows for literature and cinema.