Júlia Buisel

Ema is a very attractive but innocent girl, so pretty that cars crash in her presence. In her youth she marries Dr. Carlos Paiva, her father's friend, to whom she is not attracted. They move to the valley of Abraham. Carlos loves her, but decides to sleep in a separate room to avoid waking Ema when he has to return late at night. As time goes by she begins to feel unhappy about her marriage, so she finds a new lover.

The Life of Mirrors is one of the sections of the exhibition Luis Miguel Cintra - Small Theatre of the World. A commission by Serralves Foundation to Regina Guimarães and Saguenail, and constructed after an unpublished interview with Luis Miguel Cintra, this film is the result of a long and painstaking exercise of selecting and editing excerpts from films by Manoel de Oliveira in which Cintra participates as an actor. In this way, The Life of Mirrors is a reflective, retrospective essay film, which opens the Carte Blanche, thus establishing a gateway to Luis Miguel Cintra's cinematographic and cinephile career.

A meditation on civilization. July, 2001: friends wave as a cruise ship departs Lisbon for Mediterranean ports and the Indian Ocean. On board and on day trips in Marseilles, Pompeii, Athens, Istanbul, and Cairo, a professor tells her young daughter about myth, history, religion, and wars. Men approach her; she's cool, on her way to her husband in Bombay. After Cairo, for two evenings divided by a stop in Aden, the captain charms three successful, famous (and childless) women, who talk with wit and intellect, each understanding the others' native tongue, a European union. The captain asks mother and child to join them. He gives the girl a gift. Helena sings. Life can be sweet.

The journey of Michael Padovic, an American professor who arrives with his wife, Helene, at a Portuguese convent where he expects to find the documents needed to prove his theory: Shakespeare was born in Spain; not in England.

Despite his age and general weariness, Gebo keeps on working as an accountant to provide for his family. He lives with his wife, Doroteia, and his daughter-in-law, Sofia, but it is the absence of João, son and husband, that worries them.Gebo seems to be hiding something, especially to Doroteia, who is anxiously waiting to see her son again. Sofia is also waiting for her husband to come home, and yet she fears him. All of a sudden, João arrives and everything changes.

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

38 years after the events in the Luis Buñuel classic Belle de Jour, Henri Husson thinks he sees Séverine one night at a concert. He follows her and makes her face her past and then takes a slow revenge on her.

In a mental institution the patients see themselves as people like Jesus, Lazarus, Martha, Mary, Adam, Eve, Sonia, Raskolnikov, Aliosha e Ivan Karamasov, a Philosopher, a Profet, Santa Teresa d'Avila, reciting the Divine Comedy.

This odd film is a major representative of an even odder film genre: direct-to-celluloid opera. It was commissioned by the Portuguese master of style, director Manoel de Oliveira from composer João Paes. Musically, it ranges from 19th-century romanticism to popular, modernist and even "post-modernist" styles. In the initially tame story, a host-narrator tells the story of a wedding between the two lovebirds: Viscount d'Aveleda and the beautiful Marguerite. However, what happens in the bridal chamber is incredibly bizarre. The events after that are even stranger, and the wedding guests and family indulge in cannibalism, among other perversions.

A long-hidden, personal doc about leaving a beloved house by the late, revered Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.

A true story of a doctor and his wife who went on a journey in order to prove that discoverer Christopher Columbus was in fact Portuguese. Inspired by the book "Cristóvão Colon Era Português".

This film depicts the life of the 19th-century Portuguese writer Wenceslau De Moraes by means of nine ancient ballads from China. The writer married a Chinese woman after he left his wife and family to go live in Macao. Later, he moved to Japan where he fell in love with a Japanese woman, staying in Japan for the rest of his life. Mixed in with the career and loves of Moraes is the history of Portugal at home and in its colonies.

Don Quixote, Luís de Camões, Camilo Castelo Branco and Teixeira de Pascoaes meet in an eternal garden in the middle of a modern city and talk about life.

Luciano, fresh out of jail, was taken by his brother, Flórido, to serve in the home of wealthy Alfreda. He was surprised when she told him that her greatest desire was to see the Virgin Mary. Now comes this rich land owner with her sublime pretensions. Isn't it enough for her to have an Aston Martin and a Jaguar in the garage and ten different dresses per season? It was all professor Heschel's fault. Or someone else's. Anyway, to go beyond the promise is heresy. Alfreda said that she wouldn't rest until she saw the Virgin and made her some questions. Filipe Quinta, the Forger, says he has a solution. Meanwhile, Bahia, her husband, listens do music.

A blind beggar is robbed of his chest of money. The theft leads to a dramatic situation in the street where he begs every day.

Manoel is an aging film director who travels with the film crew through Portugal in search of the origins of Afonso, a famous French actor whose father emigrated from Portugal to France and in process remembers his own youth.

Having lost her place among the social elite, a widow remarries and starts a family.

A portrait of Belarmino Fragoso, a veteran boxer in Lisbon nearing the end of his career. In a blend of reportage and re-enactment, the many vices of the once national featherweight champion are revealed against a background of the grim economics of boxing in 1960s Portugal.

The life of Fernando Farinha, from kid where he ran away to school - to sing the fado, and the condescension of the parents, although aspiring to have an "honest" job.

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