Teresa Pinto

After breaking up with her boyfriend, a woman named Odete descends into madness and claims to be pregnant with the child of her neighbour Pedro, who died in a car crash and is mourned by his boyfriend Rui.

Inspired by the work of Bertolt Brecht and filmed in Porto's former industrial slaughterhouse, A Santa Joana dos Matadouros is a meta-cinematic essay about the labor market in times of economic crisis in Europe. The film explores the possibilities of cinema in its relationship with theater and brings together a cast of professional actors, amateurs, renowned artists from various disciplines, and a group of unemployed residents of Vale de Campanhã.

Accounts on the emptiness left by a now closed and ruined mining industry, in which we met a series of participants and testimonies that address the social inequities, the laboral violence, the accidents at work and the daily life that evolved in this particular mining community of the northern inland of Portugal at a time in which extreme poverty was real.