Marcelo Tavares

On a foggy night, a blonde woman unexpectedly haunts the path of two young men in a suburban park.

It's summer in the Portuguese countryside, where the local festivities take place. Chico is haunted by a hate crime committed in his village against a boy who was secretly close to him. Throughout this journey, Chico, pressured by his friends, tries both to follow their social standards and to hide his fears and desires.

Through saline paths, hand in hand, two lovers wander, in “Bela Mandil”.

An experimental fabulation about the Fairies' Tree. This tree is mentioned several times in Joan of Arc's trial. Imagining it multiplied in space and time, this film ritualizes this historical element, reappropriating it and turning it into a symbol of gender dissidents prosecuted by the Inquisition.

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.

“I am totally in love with Timor!”, said the Portuguese poet, anthropologist and agronomist Ruy Cinatti upon arriving on the island. From 1946 to 1974, he led a nomadic experiment, building a lasting relationship with Timor-Leste’s people and territory. The cultural identity he sought to protect is threatened by colonial oppression and the decline of the Portuguese Empire. Rejecting these circumstances, Cinatti reaches out to the people and its tribes, documenting rituals, filming, photographing and even making blood oaths with tribal chiefs to gain access to sacred places and become a Timorese.

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.

Christmas short films by the Dobra collective.