Programme 2026

Dreaming of Lions

Monday 26th of October 18:30

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

Paolo Marinou-Blanco (director) present for Q&A

Synopsis

Gilda, a Brazilian living in Lisbon, has been given a year to live and has one clear wish: to go while she is still herself. She signs up with a clandestine outfit that, for a fee, teaches its clients how to die painlessly in countries where euthanasia is illegal — and is assigned Amadeu, a young man with no discernible talent for the job. What follows is a tragicomedy about the right to choose one's own ending, and about a market that has found a way to profit even from that.

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The Scent of Things Remembered

Thursday 29th of October 19:00

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

Synopsis

Arménio, an octogenarian veteran of the Portuguese colonial war, is forced into a retirement home, where he meets Hermínia, a Black caregiver who will look after him. Confronted with the vulnerability of old age, Arménio is compelled to face the ghosts of his past, while an unexpected friendship blossoms between him and Hermínia. This film is a poetic and intimate portrayal of an elderly person in an institution, exploring the fragility of the human condition, the inevitability of death, and the quest for redemption. It addresses pressing issues in our society, such as the aging population and structural racism.

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Kora

Monday 2nd of November 19:00

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

Synopsis

Cláudia Varejão traces the silhouettes of five refugee women living in Portugal — Inna, Norina, Zohra, Margarita and Lana — after the Greek myth of the woman who drew her lover's shadow on a wall the night before he left for war, in what is said to be the first image ever made.

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Bulakna

Monday 2nd of November 19:00

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

Synopsis

Leonor Noivo borrows her title from a Filipina warrior who resisted colonial invasion, and turns it on the Filipino women of today, who leave their own families to raise other people's children abroad and hold up economies that are not their own.

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We're On Air

Thursday 5th of November 19:00

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

Synopsis

In a flat in Porto, Fátima says she feels nothing at all — and dreams every night about the policeman who has just moved in next door. Her son Vítor borrows that same uniform in secret, hoping it will make a boy he met online want him. Across town, his grandmother Júlia is plotting her escape from the care home and from a husband she stopped loving long ago. Diogo Costa Amarante's first feature is a deadpan comedy about three people in one family, each rehearsing a life they do not have.

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As Meninas Exemplares

Monday 9th of November 19:00

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

João Botelho (director) present for Q&A

Synopsis

João Botelho adapts the Countess of Ségur's trilogy of children's books — Sophie's misfortunes, the exemplary manners of Madeleine and Camille, and a summer of holidays that unravels a few old mysteries — as a study of how a child is taught to obey. Paula Rego had agreed to design the sets and costumes when the project was first conceived, back in 2001; it stalled for two decades, and she died in 2022, before shooting began. Botelho made the film anyway and dedicated it to her: the gestures, the postures, the way the girls hold themselves come straight out of her paintings.

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Entroncamento

Thursday 12th of November 19:00

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

Pedro Cabeleira (director) present for Q&A

Synopsis

Laura arrives in Entroncamento running from something, trying to start again in a railway town the trains mostly pass through. Work is scarce and honest work scarcer, and she drifts between a legitimate job and the small schemes of a group of young people as adrift as she is. Shot at night, in the director's own hometown, Pedro Cabeleira's second feature is part crime chronicle, part portrait of a generation for whom a better life is always one deal away.

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The Tree of Knowledge

Monday 16th of November 19:00

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

Eugène Green (director) present for Q&A

Synopsis

Gaspard, a teenager from the outskirts of Lisbon, falls into the hands of the Ogre, a man who long ago made a pact with the Devil. The boy is used as bait for tourists, whom the Ogre turns into animals before killing them — until Gaspard escapes with a donkey and a dog he has grown fond of, and takes shelter in an enchanted mansion haunted by the spirit of Queen Maria I. Eugène Green tells all of this with a perfectly straight face, as a fairy tale, and lets the fable do the work of a pamphlet about what mass tourism has done to the city.

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Lavagante

Thursday 19th of November 19:00

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

Synopsis

Lisbon, the early 1960s: Daniel, a doctor who opposes the Salazar regime, falls for Cecília, a student caught up in the campus revolts of the day. Their affair unfolds under the eye of the political police, in a country of censorship, informers and sudden arrests, where a private life is never entirely private. Mário Barroso — one of Portuguese cinema's great cinematographers — films the period from the last screenplay António-Pedro Vasconcelos ever wrote, adapted from a late work by José Cardoso Pires.

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We, People of the Islands

Monday 23rd of November 19:00

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

Elson Santos (director), Lara Sousa (director) present for Q&A

Synopsis

Elson Santos came across an old photograph of Cape Verdean guerrillas in Cuba, and could find no one able to explain it to him. The film that grew out of it recovers a near-forgotten chapter of the independence struggle: thirty-one young Cape Verdeans — thirty men and one woman — worn down by hunger, who left the islands in secret for military training in Cuba, preparing an invasion of their own country. Built on the testimony of the fighters who are still alive, the documentary hands a piece of national history back to the people who were sent to make it.

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The Wind Whistling in the Cranes

Thursday 26th of November 19:00

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

Jeanne Waltz (director) present for Q&A

Synopsis

When her grandmother dies, Milene is left alone: her well-off Algarve family is away on holiday and has never quite known what to do with a young woman who does not fit their idea of normal. Looking for answers, she walks out to the family's derelict canning factory and finds a Cape Verdean family living in it — and, in Antonino, someone who simply takes her as she is. Her relatives come back with a single thing on their minds, selling the land, and no intention of tolerating her happiness. From Lídia Jorge's novel, Jeanne Waltz films the Algarve of the 1990s building boom as a country still refusing to look its own prejudice in the face.

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Orlando Pantera

Monday 30th of November 19:00

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

Synopsis

Orlando Pantera died at 33, in 2001, leaving behind a body of songs that changed the course of Cape Verdean music by returning it to the Afro-rooted traditions of his native Santiago. Catarina Alves Costa follows his daughter Darlene across the island, to the people and the places that shaped him, and lets a new generation of musicians — Princezito, Zul Alves, Mayra Andrade — sing what he left unfinished. Woven together with footage Pantera himself shot in 2000, the film is less a biography than an act of summoning: a composer called back through the voices he still inhabits.

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18 Holes to Paradise

Thursday 3rd of December 19:00

🎟️ Tickets coming soon

Synopsis

On an Alentejo estate cracked open by drought, three women — and the families who own the land and the families who work it — tell the same story from irreconcilable points of view. As the sale of the property draws near and a wildfire cuts the region off from the outside world, old wounds and unpaid debts rise to the surface. João Nuno Pinto turns a shrinking patch of Portuguese countryside into the portrait of a society where not everyone has a place at the table.

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