Pedro Paiva

Felicitas Woll lives through the ups and downs of a relationship: Eva and Luis exchanged only a fleeting glance in hot summer Lisbon and knew - this is the real love! They threw themselves headlong into a passionate liaison, got married and had their first child. Everything was perfect. But now the two are on their way to the divorce lawyer. The big feelings have long since expired - at least that's how it seems ...

Tizangara, Mozambique. After the peace agreement. A mystery. UN soldiers exploding. An investigation is begun and Massimo is appointed to solve the mystery. Joaquim will have to translate, not only the words but the facts, in order for him to understand.

The memories of the trip made by the couple of artists Cavi Borges and Patrícia Niedermeier are transformed into an essay film. The scenery consists of landscapes located in Brazil, the United States, Germany, Syria, France and Hungary, where a series of choreographies and other performances created by the two are recorded.

Victor is a poor and submissive man who serves his general and the palace of an aristocratic family. Haunted by the red lips of his beloved Maria, he suffers unbearable hallucinations that lead him to the great precipice of death. “Illicit Trade” explores 3 texts by Georg Büchner - "Woyzeck", "Leonce and Lena" and “The Hessian Courier". A film adaptation of the German author's literary universe that is as anachronistic as imminently actual.

A group of workers resting in one of the fastest commuter trains in the world. This quotidian situation, filmed in slow motion, creates a prolonged moment where the slumbering minds of the sleepers are paradoxically framed with the velocity of the express train.

A major new 16mm film work Papagaio (Djambi) 2014, shot in São Tomé and Príncipe (a Portuguese speaking Island nation off the western coast of Central Africa), bears witness to a West African voodoo ritual, known locally as D’Jambi. Whilst intoxicated, the participants dance and enter a state of trance in which they channel the spirits of the dead. At times the footage is shot by the artists, and at other moments the camera becomes an alibi, held and manoeuvred by one of the participants.

A staged production shot in Maputo with the help of the Associação de Apoio aos Albinos de Moçambique. Persecuted throughout Africa the albino condition has a disturbing appearance of racial ambiguity which for the worst reasons has been the cause of suffering for a lot of people. Complexifying the racial a perception, Pedro and João create the awkward situation where 3 black albinos share jokes about the former colonial power in Moçambique, the Portuguese. Somehow what is staged here as a meta film, concerns a colonial phantasmagoria but is also a literal spin of the third man argument (TMA) Aristotle’s contestation of Plato’s theory of forms. If 2 men resemble each other, in order to be predicative as men, there would have to be a form of men, this form would have to be a man also, and it would follow that for that same form another on would have to exist and so on, on a infinite regression.

An encounter at Jardim Zoológico de Lisboa shot in 16mm by JMG+PP.

16mm film, colour, no sound, 2'35"

The eclipse of/on an eggshell.

Short silent film.

35mm film transferred to 16mm, colour, no sound, 4'11"

If a ray fish dreams…

Short silent film.

Fried eggs as a cosmic event.

16mm film, colour, no sound, 2'47" Produced by Brodbeck Foundation, Catania, Italy

Food and drink transformed into unidentified flying objects.

An elephant’s proboscis in action.

An animated 16mm film by JMG+PP.

A rite of passage.