Vasco Barbedo

Le soir, un groupe d’hommes se réunit sur le stade d’une école d’élite qu’ils ont autrefois fréquentée. Certains d’entre eux sont les grands gagnants de cette société nouvelle. Les successeurs des colons dont ils épousent les usages.

It is winter and Jonah, a Brazilian immigrant, divides his time between working in a factory producing electric motors and car parts during the day and occasional sexual encounters with other men in his car at night. Little by little, monotony and uncertainty settle in, both in work and in encounters. What will be the end point for Jonah? What is the reason for this grey weather and the weight of the car, like an iron crust creeping through the night?

Over the two and half years that he spent in the Casa de Santo Antonio in Lisbon, Philippe Costantini followed the arrivals and departures of very young mothers, from their pregnancy through to the first years with their child. At the centre of this small community of teenagers and their new-borns, the exclusively female staff see to it that the residents, whose family situations are chaotic, obey the rules. Keeping off-screen an often-mentioned violence, the film focuses on the daily lessons in mothering. What then emerges is everything that cannot be taught and which creates a fine dividing line between having a child and becoming a mother.

Jorge de Sena was forced to leave his country. First he moved to Brazil, and later to the USA. He never returned to Portugal. During his 20-year-long exile, he kept an epistolary correspondence with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. These letters are a testimony of the profound friendship between the two poets, letters of longing and of desire to “fill years of distance with hours of conversation”. Through excerpts and verses, a dialog is established, revealing their divergent opinions but mostly their strong bond, and their efforts to preserve it until their last breaths.