Natxo Checa

Welcome to Lisbon: there are mermaids by the Tagus and birds flying over the old city; there are mad scientists and singing fish; lost tourist guides and lost tourists; fado and sad guitars. What a weird city you may think - but no. Lisbon is about being different, sarcastic, welcoming to foreigners even in an economic crisis. Different directors became fascinated by our strangeness. We became fascinated by these directors. The city is never the same in these four episodes, here in Lisbon.

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A headlong dive into the deepest, silliest recesses of Abrantes’s unconscious.

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In this short comedy, Luis Vaz de Camoes, the greatest Portuguese renaissance poet, struggles creatively while engaging in a hedonistic, coprophagic, and drug addled lifestyle. The film follows the poet, and his lover Dinamene, as he writes his masterpiece, the epic poem "Os Lusiadas." He travels from the cacophony of the Indic jungles, surrounded by allegorical elephants and rhyming macaques, to the frontier of Heaven and Hell, where he is confronted by his fantasy: fame and immortality.

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In the summer of 1969, four friends built a raft to travel down two Portuguese rivers from the center of the country to Lisbon. Forty years later, the son of one of these men reported this event in a book of poems, as a metaphor of the Portuguese travel literature of the 16Th and 17Th centuries. After, it occurred to him to turn the poems into a real event, to invite some friends to reenact the raft journey and exhibit texts from those peregrinations. His brother went along to film the floating recital.

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A delirious sci-fi riff on the Arabian Nights' 'Tale of the Hunchback', that submerges us in a technological dystopia reigned by Dalaya.com, a mega-corporation that forces its employees to 'relax' at company-run medieval reenactments.

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In this short comedy, Luis Vaz de Camoes, the greatest Portuguese renaissance poet, struggles creatively while engaging in a hedonistic, coprophagic, and drug addled lifestyle. The film follows the poet, and his lover Dinamene, as he writes his masterpiece, the epic poem "Os Lusiadas." He travels from the cacophony of the Indic jungles, surrounded by allegorical elephants and rhyming macaques, to the frontier of Heaven and Hell, where he is confronted by his fantasy: fame and immortality.

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Set in Haiti, more precisely in the places affected by the 2010 tsunami, Ornithes shows us the attempt of theatre director Gabriel Abrantes to stage an as faithful as possible adaptation of The Birds by Aristophanes. However, his pedantic attitude dulls the locals, who start to rebel against his impositions. Spaced out by imaginative stories about wives transformed into goats and offered as gifts to Gods, Abrantes's revision is a game of mirrors, in which a fantastic tale alternates with another, representing a vibrant and colorful context where folklore, myth and modern myths such as Robert Patterson of Twilight overlap each other.

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Haunted by their own directionless lives, two pre-adolescent girls reunite while visiting their ailing grandmother. In the midst of her fantasies of a medieval past - one consumed by fear and desire - the two girls are transformed and confront a legacy of oppression, juxtaposing their budding identities to a trial condemning two Moorish homosexuals to burn at the stake.

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