Miguel Martins

At the dawn of the modern era, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan leads an expedition under the Spanish crown in search of the first westward route to the Spice Islands. He embarks on a perilous journey across the uncharted Pacific, where his fleet faces starvation, mutiny, and the psychological toll of endless seas. Upon reaching the shores of Cebu, Magellan is pulled into a fatal conflict with the natives by his drive to spread Catholicism, culminating in his tragic doom.

Lisbon, Portugal, 2010. Pilar, a pious woman devoted to social causes, maintains a peculiar relationship with her neighbor Aurora, a temperamental old woman obsessed with gambling who lives tormented by a mysterious past.

The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure and misfortune in the convulsed Europe of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. (A longer television version of the film of the same name, released in 2010.)

A journey through the real history and the tales of a region in southern Portugal and a portrait of the people who have lived there, weaving together accounts of rural workers and field notes of archaeologists, amateur footage and scientific drawings, legends, poems, and songs.

In 1917 Burma (now Myanmar), a British diplomat is set to marry his fiancée, but after a sudden panic, escapes to Singapore, sending her on what evolves into a chase across Asia.

A father and a son. The father will be seventy years old, the son is in his twenties. The son drives the father to the hospital. Classical music in the radio. The father did not know that the son liked classical music, and the son did not know that that would be the last time he would speak to his father. But Mozart asks that souls rejoice, that men rejoice.

A writer awakens one day to find a strange but beautiful woman in bed with him. He quickly falls in love with her, thinking he has found his muse, but as time passes she becomes more and more unattainable.

A cabaret owner tries to keep his club from being taken over by the powers that be.

Every night, in danger of being beheaded, Scheherazade tells King Shahryar unfinished tales to continue them the following night, hence defying his promise of murdering his new wives after their wedding night. Scheherazade tells King Shahryar her stories but these are not those in the book. As in the book, these stories are tragic and comical, with rich and poor, powerless and powerful people, filled with surprising and extraordinary events.

A film about General Humberto Delgado's brutal assassination by the Portuguese fascist police in 1965.

Crista, Carloto and João are building an airy greenhouse for butterflies in the garden. The three of them share household routines, day after day… And they are not the only ones.

The end of the Cold War did not bring about a definitive thaw in the former republics of the Soviet Union, so that today there are several frozen conflicts, unresolved for decades, in that vast territory. As in Transnistria, an unrecognized state, seceded from Moldova since 1990. Kolja is a silent witness of how borders and bureaucracy shape the lives of citizens, finally forced to lose their identity.

The complex relationship between master and servant is explored in director João Botelho's adaptation of Denis Diderot's popular novel Jacques le Fataliste et Son Maître. As Tiago (Rogério Samora) drives his master (André Gomes) through the Portuguese countryside to an unspecified destination, the traveling pair embark on a series of highly philosophical discussions. Flowing with tales of his life in the military and previous sexual escapades, Tiago trades a series of tales with his rapt passenger, including the story of a vengeful spurned lover who plots revenge on the nobleman who rejected her by transforming a prostitute into a society lady and convincing him to marry the tainted bride.

In which Scheherazade doubts that she will still be able to tell stories to please the King, given that what she has to tell weighs three thousand tonnes. She therefore escapes from the palace and travels the Kingdom in search of pleasure and enchantment. Her father, the Grand-Vizier, arranges to meet her at the Ferris wheel, and Scheherazade resumes her narration: “Auspicious King, in old shanty towns of Lisbon there was a community of bewitched men who, in all rigour and passion, dedicated themselves to teaching birds to sing…”. And seeing the morning break, Scheherazade fell silent.

On a train to Algarve, a young man recounts to a fellow passenger his past relationship with an eccentric young woman.

Rita is fifteen and spends the summer between warm afternoons of teenage love and party nights with her friend Sara. From Portugal to the South Pacific, the pleasures of this routine will take a turn when the young girl visits the art show of a new neighbor in the local community.

Scheherazade narrates three more tales, supposedly selected from the 470th, 484th and 497th nights of her ordeal: “It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport himself to escape the Guard while dreaming of prostitutes and partridges. A wounded cow will reminisce about a thousand-year-old olive tree while saying what she must say, which will sound none less than sad!

Ana Catarina returns from Brazil with her father and her nanny to marry a man she doesn't know and doesn't like. A terrible coincidence happens when, on the same day, the young woman becomes a widow and an orphan, a fact that leaves her heir to an incalculable fortune and coveted by all the aristocrats in the region.

Filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos sifts through the memories of her ancestors. Her naval officer grandfather, Henrique, who married her grandmother, Beatriz, on her 21st birthday, spent extended periods at sea, leaving her with six children. This is the beginning of a generational saga.

An intriguing story about a family and a manor house (where some terrible crimes were committed in the past by a member of that family) adapted from a novel with the same title by Tabajara Ruas.