The film was to be a documentary, but evolved during production to a fictional film. It nevertheless adheres strictly to the poems and letters exchanged by two of the most outstanding names of the Modernist Movement, Fernando Pessoa (in Lisbon) and Mário de Sá-Carneiro (in Paris). Their endless conversation was dramatically and suddenly terminated.
America is a legend, an idea. To rediscover the traces of such an idea within the reality of a city requires a transformation of this very city into ideas and legends, to the point that life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, that which can be communicated, and that which cannot, high and low are open to a contradictory understanding.
In Portuguese Africa in 1973, a small platoon of soldiers is stranded, prey both to an unseen guerrilla enemy and to their own doubts about the war they are waging. Twelve years on, an elderly couple, still mourning the death of their son in the African campaign, make one last visit to their surviving children, now grown up and living in Lisbon. Botelho's delicately mesmerising...
Vicente, seventeen, lives with brother Nino, ten-years-old, and his ailing father in a derelict house on the outskirts of the capital. They don't seem to remember their mother, and are very much attached to their father, despite his temper, and his frequent absences from home. One day, the father leaves for good, and Vicente and Nino swear to cover it up. It's their secret. Cla...