When her mother dies, 40-year-old Helena now has time for herself after years of taking care of her family. She works at a film production company, dances boisterously, gets drunk. A quiet film about letting go morphs into a coming of middle age story.

Cidade Rabat

It's a summer weekend in a country house near Sintra, in Portugal. Fourteen-year-old Nicolau is spending a couple of days with his older brother Simão and his friends, all of them in their late twenties. Everyone is drawn to the beautiful and quiet Maria do Mar, but Nicolau will see his life the most deeply shaken by her. Between homework and tree-climbing, stories about a deceased philandering grandfather and the origins of the tortellini's shape, a friend in a costume nursing a broken heart and seduction games, Nicolau observes this group of young adults.

Maria do Mar

In the heart of Bairro Alto, right in the centre of Lisbon, the building of an old printing workshop is demolished to make way for luxury apartments. Seeing this as a perfect image for the death of a certain Lisbon in the wake of the financial crisis and the ensuing real estate and touristic boom, the director films an urban diary portraying the daily life of the construction site and those who work there. What starts out as a work-centred film turns out to be the story of the director’s relationship with his hometown and with the people who build it.

Death of a City

It’s springtime in Lisbon and Nicolau turns 24, but he’s not celebrating. Living in his parents’ house, hostage to a dream of being a musician that never comes true and plagued by the ideal image of an ex-girlfriend who left him a year ago and never came back, Nicolau feels incapable of moving forward and inventing a life of his own. He takes odd jobs until the day he discovers that his mother is just as dissatisfied with life as he is. Nicolau is shaken, but he doesn’t stumble.