Movies: José Manuel Mendes

Filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos sifts through the memories of her ancestors. Her naval officer grandfather, Henrique, who married her grandmother, Beatriz, on her 21st birthday, spent extended periods at sea, leaving her with six children. This is the...

The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure and misfortune in t...

Marilou and Philippe decide to show their grandchildren their new holiday home in Portugal. But once there, they discover to their horror that the house is still under construction. This is just the beginning of the problems for the grandparents, bec...

A 70-year-old man is in a relationship with a young man named Heiko. It is a fetishist relationship taken to extreme exoticism....

In which Scheherazade tells of how desolation invaded men : “It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport h...

A nun is called upon to adopt her 15-year-old nephew, and as a consequence religious, familial and sensual love become entangled....

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. Fr...

A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the...

This Portuguese movie directed by João Botelho, is part of The Four Elements series. This is the second episode, The Air....

This odd film is a major representative of an even odder film genre: direct-to-celluloid opera. It was commissioned by the Portuguese master of style, director Manoel de Oliveira from composer João Paes. Musically, it ranges from 19th-century romanti...

At the end of the nineteenth century, two inexperienced Portuguese colonizers, with a vague intention of civilizing the colonies, disembark in a remote part of the Congo River in order to coordinate a trading post. As time goes by, they become incre...

Manoel de Oliveira directs José Régio's historical epic of religious and political power struggles. King Sebastião plans to make Portugal the world's Fifth Empire....

Cristina is twenty years old. Her father was declared missing in action during the war in Angola many years before. One day in church the girl meets a man about fifty years old who tries various times, unsuccessfully, to make the sign of the cross. T...

Macau 1897. Life is easy for Portuguese settlers. Young reveler Francisco Frontaria is deemed as irresponsible for all his partying and boozing. Shunned and exiled for crossing a line by insulting the daughter of a prominent family, he finds himself ...

Having lost her place among the social elite, a widow remarries and starts a family....

Based on the events which took place the night of April 24th, 1999 in Portugal. This is the story of the Coup d'État which put an end to the Dictatorship and reinstated the Democracy....

Tiago, a tour guide with a broken heart leads Karen, a grieving and aging Brazilian woman, around a Lisbon of strange suicidal heroes. Tiago lives with his father, Raul, an old sailor haunted by historical defeats, and with his son, Manuel, a teenage...

It is the end of summer and Isabel is a relationship with Diogo. She don't quite know what she wants from her life going forward as her father gets sick....

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