Clara Jost

In 2017, in Portugal, devastating wildfires destroyed forests and killed children and adults; some died in their villages, others were trapped on a road. Communication failed, and the villages had no shelters. The film’s action does not take place in 2017, but at a later time. It follows a small group of people who lost their dearest ones and are now in the process of learning how to live after everything they have lost.

Ana lives in a little village by the sea, with her husband and daughter. He decides to leave for a few days. That seems to be the ideal solution, because Ana needs to finish a work she has been doing for a long time. But her concentration seems threatened when she starts doing her daily walks by the village and the beach: she saves a stranger from death in the sea, meets young Alexandre and Emilia, and her friend Vera turns up in her house. And then, everything changes…

Struggling against the crisis in Portugal, a mother doubles up jobs to pay the bills since her husband is unemployed. Their teenage daughter tries to keep living everyday life even if the money is running short, which makes everything uneasy. Escaping from their common reality, they slowly become strangers to one another, as the tension grows in silence and in guilt.

A November day in Porto, in a square where skaters jump up a flight of stairs. Three characters share a moment, which is divided into three subjective shots and which, without dialogue, are intended to characterize them emotionally. The idea of shared love is called into question.

Marta and Jorge have been a couple for seven years. All their friends think they are living a perfect romance. Too perfect, perhaps, for the despair of all: Bruno, who is much younger than Marta but madly in love with her; Lígia, who is Bruno's sister and Marta's best friend and would love to see her brother happy; Carlos, Jorge's friend, who maintains a superficial romance with Lígia while secretly in love with Marta; and for Jorge himself, who is afraid this idyllic romance will imprison him and, convinced that his love and his lover's desire to marry will take away his freedom, decides to show her the way into Carlos arms.

A young adolescent, living with a swinger couple in a campsite, meets an emotionally unstable man and finds herself fascinated by his special powers.

Several images follow one another to the work of António Pinho Vargas, Six Portraits of Pain, played in full.

Gabi believes in her ability to act in times of injustice, relying on her physical abilities. One day, Gabi finds out that her brother, Daniel, is a victim of bullying in their neighbourhood. Suffering from unexpected outbreaks of sleepwalking, he disappears from home during the night. While trying to avenge him, Gabi realizes that perhaps all the coinciding events related to her brother are a test made by ghosts of the past.

In June 2016, a girl bought a tomato plant. As there were no cherry tomato plants available, she had to buy a regular tomato one. Even though she knew the pot was small, the tomato plant lived his whole existence in it, until October of that same year, in apparent independence and indifference. Against all odds, the tomato plant managed to blossom and bear one fruit, just the one tomato.

A man, Francisco, works in an open-pit mine. He goes to see his boss about taking the following day off. At first the boss doesn’t want to allow it as there is so much to do, but he finally concedes. The next day his daughter calls on him, a visit he no longer counted on. They spend the day with one another. The longer they are together, and the later the night gets, the more absurd the situations and moments they experience become.

In Rio de Janeiro, people from the Mangueira neighbourhood follow the television broadcast on a big screen as the juries vote on each samba school. In 2019, Mangueira took to the Sambadrome a strong, bold samba of resistance to what’s taking place in Brazil right now. The film witnesses the tension while waiting for the final score, and the great joy of people from every generation when Mangueira wins and becomes champion of the 2019 Carnival.

Strangers cross paths on a bus ride at night.

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A young man sits on a busy street in Lisbon to draw the people passing by. Not too distant, a couple talks about the origin of a wallet found months earlier. The light of one moment is reflected on the other.

A student far from home, talks to his mother on the phone. The distance to the mother and the distance to the gardeners are the two weights in tension that start from the first window of the film, the first frame, through which we occupy our gaze. Distance works like a thread that binds us to someone, a phone call, for example, or the invisible thread that pierces the center of the Earth and joins me to the feet of whoever is on the other side of the mirror. Sound and image are understood in a dynamic of You + Me, elements that present themselves independently, each paying attention to a layer of perception. Were it not for Marcelo's relationship with sound, the biggest and warmest embrace, the most intimate and generous, offering, within the film, care and attention and, to those watching from the outside, the nature of the relationships that are shown to us.