Shellac Films

In the heart of Portugal, amid the mountains, the month of August is abuzz with people and activity...

To live and to love at the age of 18, immersing yourself in the carefree summer days and nights, losing your best friend suddenly, and realizing that nothing lasts forever. It’s a time of decisive encounters in order to be reborn.

After a serious accident Giuseppe is out of work. His son Antò dreams of being an archaeologist and thinks his father's glass eye is a sign he has superpowers. It's just the two of them now, since their beloved wife and mother Angela collapsed and died while working in the fields. Now they've lost their home, too, and have taken shelter in a tent city with other seasonal workers. Through all this, Giuseppe still summons up the strength to hug his son every night and tell him a story. He's promised Antò he will have his mother back, one day, and will do anything to keep his promise.

Different portraits, four short stories, four moments in time capturing the wanderings of a few souls, stuck at the crossroads of History.

Summer 1944, France. Racine is a carefree 19-year-old first-aid worker, his secret desire is to be able to sleep with Isabelle, the girl he's in love with. One evening they are about to take the plunge, but a resistance fighter comes to ask for help. Racine goes up to the maquis to impress the young girl and joins a group of fifteen immature boys. But up there, nothing goes as planned. The war catches up with them, brutally marking the end of an innocence and Racine finds himself caught in the crossfire.

France works at her family’s karaoke restaurant on an old boat at the shores of lake Nam Ngum. She falls in love with Xana, an underwater logger, while Tony Wong, a quiet and sentimental Chinese billionaire which is exploiting this subwater richness declares his heart to her. It’s then that Hugo arrives in search of his wife Nadine who left one year ago… He enters a surreal period of exile, captivated by life around the lake’s splendour.

Summertime. While a pandemic spreads overall, Paul, his wife Hélène and his little sister Lisa, isolate themselves in their countryside house. There, they meet old friends : Bruno and his sister Mélanie… Some of them love each other but say it wrongly ; some of them don’t even dare to say it ; some of them hate each other… What will strike them first? Disease or despair?

A year in the life of Elsa Michaud and Gabriel Gauthier, students of Fine Arts in Paris, lovers in troubled times, overwhelmed by maddening verbal and auditory stimuli, witnesses of a globalized violence more visible than ever in a chaotic digital era, in which the slow execution of simple gestures in a silent performance is an act of resistance.

Sometime after the fall of the Soviet empire, three stories about sex, violence, and boredom.