Graça Castanheira, PT, DOC, 34'

“A Rua da Estrada” travels around Portuguese roads, with its very peculiar landscapes – a seismograph of passing time. Voiced by geographer Alvaro Domingues, the film shows us a trip around Portugal as it is.

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8 March, 9:30 pm

Galeria de Arte do Convento Espírito Santo, Loulé

Thom Andersen, USA, DOC, 34'

City symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks (including El Monte Legion Stadium and the Barrelhouse in Watts). The musical fragments compose an impressionistic survey of popular music made in Los Angeles (and a few other places) from 1941 to 1999, with an emphasis on rhythm’n’blues and jazz from the 1950s and corridos from the 1990s. The music of Richard Berry, Johnny Otis, Leiber and Stoller, and Los Tigres del Norte is featured prominently.

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8 March, 9:30 pm

Galeria de Arte do Convento Espírito Santo, Loulé

Tim Travers Hawkins, UK, DOC, 9'

‘Surpriseville’ visits the City of Surprise, Arizona; a man-made oasis; a master-planned community where residents go to great lengths to ensure life is as safe as possible. Yet perfect order is sustained through strict rules and regulations, gates and walls that surround and divide them. What are the residents giving up in the pursuit of happiness and security?

The film explores 21st century suburbia, where high-density, master-planned cities are defined by walls, gated communities and privatised spaces; where the longing to create the perfect community is undermined by mistrust, fear and division, and the desire for perfect security and happiness appears at odds with our freedom.

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15 March, 9:30 pm

Galeria Praça do Mar, Quarteira

Ana Maria Gomes, FR/PT, DOC, 45'

Antonio, the director’s uncle, left Portugal for Brazil 50 years ago, at the age of 19 – never to return. Over the years, he has promised his mother that he would come back… but half a century later, she is still waiting.

Why did he never return? “He may believe that life lasts a lifetime, but no,” says his brother Bento, indignant. His 90-year-old mother has grown bitter and resigned: “If he doesn’t give a damn about me, likewise!” Between the Portuguese hamlet where the uncle was born and grew up, and the megalopolis of Rio where he lives in a self-imposed exile, there is a world of misunderstanding and things that go unsaid.

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15 March, 9:30 pm

Galeria Praça do Mar, Quarteira

Luís Azevedo, PT, DOC, 12'

After eleven years in the city, José António Baptista returned to his homeland in order to devote himself to literature.

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15 March, 9:30 pm

Galeria Praça do Mar, Quarteira

Cem Raios t'Abram, PT, DOC, 14'

On our face, the bread we knead,

In our mouth, the bread we all are.

The sun on the snowy night,

From the cold spring to the warm bonfire.

The earthworm searches for the earth-hole,

The furze surrounds the white birch, In a spiraling life.

The cold kept us warm.

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22 March, 9:30 pm

CAPa, Centro de Artes Performativas do Algarve, Faro

Pedro Flores, PT, DOC, 15'

Gerês, Portugal. Days are born with fire and die with it. Men renew the earth with ancient practices. All beings inhabit the same place.

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22 March, 9:30 pm

CAPa, Centro de Artes Performativas do Algarve, Faro

Daniele Atzeni, IT, FIC, 32'

Antonio Gairo is the only survivor of a terrible disaster in 1964 that hit Alos, a village in the centre of Sardinia, now a gloomy shanty town. Once his memories return, he tells the story of the life of the village before the fateful event and in an incredibly clear way, reconstructs the circumstances that led to the tragedy. A mix between fiction and documentary, cinema and literature, the film uses a wide range of archive footages to narrate the fatal step towards “modernity” taken by a small community of shepherds in the 1950s, mingling classic iconography about archaic Sardinia with the suggestive and fascinating atmospheres related to the Gothic genre.

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22 March, 9:30 pm

CAPa, Centro de Artes Performativas do Algarve, Faro

Eduardo Brito, PT, FIC, 9'

The distopian city of Penumbria was founded two hundred years ago, in a distant istmus – a place of arid soils, angry seas and violent weather. Penumbria was due its name to the almost permanent shadow, caused be a southern mountain. One day, its inhabitants decided to leave, offering the city to time. This is the story of an uninhabitable place.

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29 March, 9:00 pm

Museu do Trajo - Amigos do Museu, São Brás de Alportel

Roger Gomez, Dani Resines, SP, DOC, 12'

1939, the end of The Great Depression. Ivan Besse, took his camera to the streets to film his

fellow citizens in Britton, South Dakota. 80 years later, a filmmaker travels to Britton to see what remains of those movies. Notes from Sometime, Later are the first reflections around this story, a tale about memory, an account about what’s left when one disappears; a story about absence but also about future, determination and love, the love of cinema we share with millions.

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29 March, 9:00 pm

Museu do Trajo - Amigos do Museu, São Brás de Alportel

Sergei Loznitsa, PT, DOC, 40'

In the middle of June the village of Santo Antonio de Mixoes da Serra in the Valdreu region of Northern Portugal honours its Patron Saint with a very special festival. On this day the local farmers bring their animals to the church – cows, horses, dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits – to be blessed. This ancient tradition is passed from generation to generation, and today, just as hundreds of years ago, animals and people flock up the mountain roads to the church square to become a part of the religious festival. The film is about this miracle.

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29 March, 9:00 pm

Museu do Trajo - Amigos do Museu, São Brás de Alportel