Leonor Areal

In her visual essay, Leonor Areal invites the viewer to look in detail at a centenary film and at the dozens of people who appear after a concert, most of them men, in full suits and hats, many with mustaches. Among them, the poet Fernando Pessoa is sought.

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The autobiographical texts and letters by film director Manuel Guimarães, and exchanged by him with friends, are the axis for the intimate narrative of his life, social concerns, passion for movies - while revisiting many movies of the 20th century and his complete filmography. One segment documents the epic way directors attempted to bypass official censorship to show their movies out of the country.

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Lisbon, Portugal, Europe, 2011. A slum is about to be demolished. On the verge of becoming homeless, dwellers organize to defend their right to housing.

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Lesbian couple Teresa and Lena made national news in Portugal when they applied to get married. Leonor Areal's camera follows them, one amid scores of reporters' cameras, as they deal with the denial of their petition, and, more significantly, with the negative fallout the publicity generates. Though seeking equal rights, in the process of being recognizable public figures, the two women and their daughters instead find themselves facing even greater discrimination in housing, work, and school.

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This documentary shows a Brigade of medicine students that goes to a school to prevent AIDS. For 10 weeks, we follow their failures and achievements with a class of difficult but interesting characters. A film that asks us many questions about talking of sexuality and that is an important case study to the actual political debate on sexual education. The Brigades are voluntary groups of medicine students, who go to the schools to prevent risky behaviours and fight AIDS. Doctor Strange Love follows the action of a Brigade in the midst of a teenager class, focusing on value contrasts and relationships, through this experience of changing minds and consciousness.

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A class of 9-year-old children is making an animated movie, whose chosen theme is the “War on Iraq”. Their protagonists are the same we see on TV: George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Saddam, and Bin Laden. But the story is quite more imaginative… Children talk with no interference from adults, and the final result is the product of their free expression. While they discuss war matters and fiction strategy, camera captures their dialogs with intimacy, and shows us their unexpected sense of humour. Nevertheless, they commit to the story with total dedication and faithfulness, as in a real labour. The way they make decisions, and talk and listen to each other, is a vivid lesson of democracy (in every place of the world).

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The starting point was a commonplace: «My life could be a movie». Following what each person believed to be subject for film, this documentary tells 4 life stories. This implies a main question: what moves the protagonists to show & tell their lives as a movie? Revisiting places where they lived, they evoke their memories, and through their personal documents and archive footage, we retrace their paths and decisions in life. As their destinies have crossed at several moments, places and circumstances, we are able to understand it from different, and contrasting, perspectives. They testify post-war famine, emigration to Africa or France, Salazar’s dictatorship, colonial war and the socialist revolution – in brief, the way Portuguese society evolved in the second half of the century. ILLUSIAD is a film about common people’s hopes, disillusions and survival skills.

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For a decade, the unexpected theater group “Os Felizes da Fé” left its mark on the late 20 century’s art map. With its street happenings, the Felizes defied all forms of authority: civil, political or moral. However, their activity stopped suddenly in 1995.

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He was the most prolific within the New Portuguese Cinema generation. He would try western spaghetti, esoteric allegory, supernatural, and science-fiction. Without state subsidies, he would quit filmmaking in the 1990s. Who remembers António de Macedo?

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Leonor Areal bought a 16mm reel of film at the Flea Market, and found a lost movie made by Edgar Sardinha in the 1980s. Having no soundtrack, she decided to create a new one, in an attempt to rescue it from oblivion. Through this inquiry process, a film-essay emerged to let us reflect upon the erosion of memory.

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The autobiographical texts and letters by film director Manuel Guimarães, and exchanged by him with friends, are the axis for the intimate narrative of his life, social concerns, passion for movies - while revisiting many movies of the 20th century and his complete filmography. One segment documents the epic way directors attempted to bypass official censorship to show their movies out of the country.

Open details →

Lesbian couple Teresa and Lena made national news in Portugal when they applied to get married. Leonor Areal's camera follows them, one amid scores of reporters' cameras, as they deal with the denial of their petition, and, more significantly, with the negative fallout the publicity generates. Though seeking equal rights, in the process of being recognizable public figures, the two women and their daughters instead find themselves facing even greater discrimination in housing, work, and school.

Open details →

This documentary shows a Brigade of medicine students that goes to a school to prevent AIDS. For 10 weeks, we follow their failures and achievements with a class of difficult but interesting characters. A film that asks us many questions about talking of sexuality and that is an important case study to the actual political debate on sexual education. The Brigades are voluntary groups of medicine students, who go to the schools to prevent risky behaviours and fight AIDS. Doctor Strange Love follows the action of a Brigade in the midst of a teenager class, focusing on value contrasts and relationships, through this experience of changing minds and consciousness.

Open details →