A documentary essay about a text that penetrates lives and lives that penetrate a text.  In September 2015 teatro GRIOT - a theatre company based in Lisbon, whose actors are mostly Afro-descendants - started to rehearse Shakespeare's "The Tempest" with acclaimed director Bruno Bravo in a little coastal village. Starting with the first rehearsals the film explores Shakespeare's text and the actors' biographies, between the play and the landscape and brings up topics such as memories, home, emigration and colonialism. A complex mosaic of multiple voices.

Tempests - Essay on a Rehearsal

We stare at mirrors as if 'image' was a weapon of self-defense. At night, I hide in actors' dressing rooms for a working class experience. By day, I face an old theatre being razed to the ground, making way for a parking lot. Graffitis have curtains, the nose cap of an umbrella arises from a mount of sand. Oh, Happy Days! No need to stage anything! The bulldozer is a dinosaur whose teeth and gracious neck swings by a EU flag. In the boxes, we await the audience. Sometimes, nobody comes. Lost in a symbolic show of reality, I can only watch the world's end because all the endangered species perform and a reflecting labyrinth of life stories breaks through the glass of the Economic Eating Machine. Even when the sky is falling, theatre will always happen. So, choose the right place.

O lugar que ocupas

A young girl, traveling in the south of Angola, meets a retired doctor who deals with the memories of war and its perpetual waste. An adaptation of the short tale "The Dragonfly", by Ondjaki.

A Pedra

Two Angola, the colonial and the contemporary, spaced 60 years, share the curse of a mysterious island. In the past, the epicenter of the tragedy is an evil fortress, tomb of revolutionaries deported from the mainland. In the present, the building of a luxurious resort awakens the relentless jaw of justice. Soon after, workmen lacerated dead bodies, begin to appear. The horror spreads rapidly. Pedro Mbala is sent to the island to solve the problem. His target is a pack of stray dogs.

A Ilha dos Cães

On the shores of Lisbon, Arriaga, a 25 years old boy from a middle-class family of emigrants walks alone through the silent and wrinkled streets by vices of the nightlife. Arriaga deals with his self-destructive alter ego to be accepted among the youth of his neighborhood. Everything happens in one place, everything revolves around a single moment, what is suspicious only the unexpected can unfold.

Arriaga

Pérola (39 years), a female lawyer, return to Angola, for her younger sister´s  “Alambamento” (traditional Angolan ceremony where dowries and promises are exchanged between a couple) more than 20 years living abroad.  On coming back, she realises that she does not fit in that environment anymore. The world that saw her come to life is now uncomfortable.  In the beginning, she remains apart, watching all her parents do and say in a judgmental way, but as the party unfolds, Pérola starts to see the beauty of the place.  That land and it´s People reveal a charm that she was not expecting and suddenly she understands that all her loneliness and emptiness she has felt all those years was only her home beckoning her back.