A photographer, Isaac is asked by hotel owners to take portraits of their recently deceased daughter Angélica. When he looks at her through the lens of his camera, she appears to come back to life just for him. He instantly falls in love with her. From that moment, he will be haunted by Angélica day and night.
Leyla, a lawyer and a poet, takes the long-distance train to attend her high school reunion dinner. On the train, she meets Canan, a young nursing student in distress. As the conversation develops, Leyla learns that Canan is travelling to assist with the suicide of a paralysed man, Yavuz, who wants to die. At the end of the long over- night trip, surrounded by the stories of people both on and off the train, Leyla decides to accompany Canan on her difficult visit.
On a train to Algarve, a young man recounts to a fellow passenger his past relationship with an eccentric young woman.
With her abusive husband in jail and a coveted divorce pending, hardworking Noura can almost grasp a happy, new life with lover Lassaad — but when the best-laid plans are upended, Noura must tap her unshakable will to fulfill her dream.
In 1982, Yann Andréa and Marguerite Duras have been living together for two years. She is almost 70 years old, while he is 38 years her junior. Andréa asks journalist and writer Michèle Manceaux to interview him about his life with Duras, an obsession that both impassions him and drives him mad. He believes by entrusting their story to Manceaux, he may gain more clarity of the relationship. What follows is an intense and compelling conversation delving into the deepest recesses of modern love.
1907. Afonso, a doctor, arrives at Principe Island to cure servants from a cocoa plantation “infected” with Banzo, nostalgia of the slaves, who are dying from starvation and suicide. The group is confined to the forest, where Afonso decides to heal them by trying to understand what is affecting their soul. Will he manage to save them?
A hotel by the northern shore of Portugal welcomes its guests over the weekend. A man is torn between being present for his wife and the space that his mother takes up between the two of them. A mother encourages her daughter’s marriage to enable her own love affair with her son-in-law. Another mother lives through her daughter, preventing her from making her own decisions. Three families at the end of their cycles of acceptance.
In 2011 Portugal began the so-called "year of the Troika" (EU, IMF and ECB budget cuts and economic restructuring), with the level of debt among the Portuguese people reaching staggering amounts and a growing number of families and companies unable to repay their installment loans. Jorge is an unemployed boxer on the verge of losing his son and his wife, who has decided to return to Brazil. As a means of paying off his debt and persuading his wife to remain in Portugal, Jorge accepts a job with a debt-collection agency, which will drag him into a world of violence and crime.
After being the sole unfortunate witness to a domestic quarrel that ends up in murder, Patrascu finds himself at odds with two very close neighbors: one is the bizarre murderer. The other is his very own conscience.
Johnny, aged 20, can't live without Fanfan, his twin sister. There is a very particular intimacy between them. They walk together everywhere, share the same room, the same tastes, the same bike, the same camping tent. But also a conflict principle sets in. Oppressed by his overbearing need, she decides to head for the south of Portugal, the country of their parents. His dreams are shattered; he feels deeply betrayed by his sister. Caught between his father who is preparing to retire to Portugal and his mother who refuses to leave France, he tries to work out his own identity. His passion for rock music gets him involved with his sister's former lover. By following this charismatic leader preaching dubious ideology, he risks losing his "gentle half" forever. Meanwhile in Portugal, she becomes disillusioned. Will they manage to grow up without each other?
Day breaks on the eighth floor in a suburban neighbourhood of Lisbon and 14-year-old David’s grandfather is still in hospital. Doctors give him only a few days to live. The imminence of death and the void that it will leave force David to become the man of the house, where he lives with his mother Mónica, who is in her 30s, and his three-year-old sister.
Alice, a buoyant and impertinent red-hair teenager is far from the charming little girl her mother adopted as she was unable to have a child of her own. Being an endless source of problems and affected by the specter of her mother’s disappointments, Alice acts with her back against the wall, forging lies and blurring lines between the fiction she designs for herself and the reality of her existence. Until her mother discovers she is pregnant.
In a family-run hotel, by the Portuguese northern shore, lives a group of women from different generations of the same family, whose relationships with each other have grown poisoned by bitterness. They try to survive in the declining hotel, as the unexpected arrival of a granddaughter to this oppressive space stirs trouble, reviving latent hatred and piled-up resentments.
Shimu, 23, works in a clothing factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Faced with difficult conditions at work, she decides to start a union with her co-workers. Despite threats from the management and disapproval of her husband, Shimu is determined to go on. Together the women must fight and find a way to register their union.
50-year-old Victor Ganz owns a thriving civil engineering company that operates worldwide. But when some very costly problems on a site force him to go to Morocco, he is confronted with memories from his youth, that he had so far managed to bury. Between his meetings in ministries, the reappearance of a lost love who had mysteriously disappeared and an investigation into the local underground, Victor Ganz plunges into a labyrinthine world where present and past intertwine.
During the war of in-dependency Evita moves from Lisbon to Mozambique to marry Luís. She slowly discovers how different and disturbing life is in a country of war and when her husband is send on a military mission she starts to fight loneliness. Over time she finds out more about her husband and Mozambique than she would have imagined in her peaceful European home. Racism, violence, injustice and fatalism make life unbearable...
Four people with different values and standards meet in the urban chaos of Copacabana. Rita and Waldick come from the country, and befriend two Rio de Janeiro native guys, upon arrival: the playboy and surfer Paulo Roberto and a pimp called Tim.
Abandoned at birth in the Greek mountains on a stormy night, Jon is taken in and adopted, without having known his father or mother. As a young man, he meets Iro, a warden in the prison where he is incarcerated after a deadly tragic accident. She seems to seek out his presence, takes care of him, records music for him. Jon’s eyesight begins to fail … From then on, for every loss he suffers, he will gain something in return. Thus, in spite of going blind, he will live his life more fully than ever.
A 20-year veteran of the Angolan civil war returns to the capital city of Luanda where he faces the challenges of assimilation and survival.
Rafa is a 13 years old kid concerned with his mother, held in a police station for driving without a license. The director shows a day in the life of a teenager who lives on a problematic area and discovers that her mother was arrested because of an automobile accident.
