Francisca Manuel

Two young Portuguese women try to put down roots in Brazil. Teresa is newly arrived; Francisca has been there a while. This sure-footed, loving portrait of two counterparts, attracting and repelling, is also an ode to Belo Horizonte: a city with no tourist attractions, but bags of atmosphere and lust for life.

A Lisbon night is traversed by the intensity of René, a precarious young Brazilian who has anchored in town, immersed in personal and existential conflicts. Queer parties, love, rejection and loneliness move through her body, out of place between the two continents. Stephanie Ricci captures the experiences of a free soul on the run, of one who doesn’t know where, how and when, with vivid sequences and conversations that impregnate a magnificent city portrait.

A contemporary reinterpretation of the tradition of pilgrimages in the Azores, historically carried out exclusively by men. In the film, a group of women make a pilgrimage to the island of Pico; along the way, one of them disappears, raising questions about their individual and collective existence as female bodies. These are bodies that literally walk to break the bubble of passivity, guided by action, ritual and resistance.

In a dystopian future where survival of all life on the planet depends on the ragged remnants of what used to be the Amazon rainforest, eco-activist couple Rob and Ryan acknowledge the fact that their mission to save humanity from extinction is doomed. Leaving the rainforest behind, they and adopt little Sasha, born of a young woman who rented her womb for money only to die giving birth. Forced to look straight into the cynicism and selfishness of their choices, while Apocalypse rages around them, Rob and Ryan must finally face their own contradictions without hypocrisy.

Between 2006 and 2014, a building on Liberty Avenue in Lisbon, it was a place for fifty national and international artists, in the idea of developing their artistic practice. Throughout these years, a series of events have taken place including concerts, improvisations, performances, workshops, classes and mostly collective and individual exhibitions. After the emergence of the New Bank, the Avenue space was sold for millions of euros, to make way for a luxury condominium. Here the building itself is retracted as a character, hosting some phantom testimonies of artists who have passed by.