Guto Parente

Erik Satie’s work is at the heart of modern music. However, who was Satie? An elusive genius or a visionary misanthrope? The film tries to sketch an identikit of the musician through his notes and the places he lived in. Musicologists mostly agree in describing Satie’s music as inhabited by voids and holes. The long pauses between one musical passage and the other are musical structures unto themselves; therefore, the filmmakers create a dissonant Satie-like universe in which empty spaces are adjacent to eloquent passages. Like a mysterious flower visible only to the eye that is willing to dance with its charm, the film unfolds little by little through mental associations and creative juxtapositions. There are no answers in the universe inhabited by the ghosts of Satie’s creations. Architectural forms and recollections from desires and acts of creative hubris compete to create a new world, which ultimately is the image of a new and more seductive pleasure principle.

No man is a failure when he has friends.

Filmed over six years in four countries: Portugal, Brazil, Colombia and United States, this romantic drama tells the story of Luzia, a Brazilian screenwriter, and Adrian, a Colombian actor, that fall in love during a film festival in 2009 and will live a fragmented love story while competing in different film festivals around the world.

Away from home, living alone in an old and gloomy apartment, Pérola feels the effects of the time passing, being increasingly taken by nostalgia and fear to a point where dream, fantasy and reality lose its borders.

“Always keep Ythaca on your mind. To arrive there is your ultimate goal. But do not hurry the voyage at all. It is better to let it last for many years; and to anchor at the island when you are old, rich with all you have gained on the way, not expecting that Ythaca will offer you riches. Ythaca has given you the beautiful voyage. Without her you would have never set out on the road. She has nothing more to give you. And if you find her poor, Ythaca has not deceived you. Wise as you have become, with so much experience, you must already have understood what Ythaca mean.” Konstantínos Kaváfis

Arrested since a popular demonstration in 2013, Janaína escapes and meets her friend Cassia in a context of an ongoing coup d’etat. Their reunion brings along their drums and attempts to break out the imposed silence over black lesbian bodies.