Movies: Tiago Hespanha

1979. Flicking through pictures from a Soviet magazine, 15-year-old Martim dreams of building a new society. His radical communist parents send him to study at Astrakan for one year. In her new film, Catarina Mourão captures with tremendous precision...

A dive, the midday sunlight filtering down through the water. The air in her lungs has to last until she can dislodge the abalone. Dives like these have been carried out in Japan for over 2000 years by the Ama-San....

The afternoon Jorge asks Mariana over for a weekend at his house in Leiria, she starts to see him in a whole new light. Unsure of her friend’s intentions, Mariana accepts his unexpected and baffling invitation....

Through a city that carries the weight of broken expectations and tough absencies, we follow the day of three young adults. César who got into a photoshoot by accident, Chloé who hopes to find a place to do her own work, and Helena who is back in her...

Karlon, born in Pedreira dos Húngaros (a slum in the outskirts of Lisbon) and a pioneer of Cape Verdean creole rap, runs away from the housing project to which he had been relocated....

Somewhere in the mountains, a man lives alone in a disappearing village. Wandering through the misty nature, interpreting among the walls of his dark houses, on the very ground with his destiny to belong to a world that has been rejected....

One night, a group of workers realises that the administration is stealing machines and raw materials from their own factory. As they organize to survey the equipment and block the relocation of production, they are forced to stand at their posts wit...

They walk in pairs; they go door to door and visit the homes of those who wish to listen. They discuss matters of faith, family, demureness, religion and being. Their quest is personal, it is about proving themselves, an initiation that lasts for the...

Estado de Excepção is a documentary about CITAC (Coimbra Theater Initiation Circle), a university theater group, revealing history since it was constituted in 1956 until the aftermath of the 1974 revolution. It is the history of the theater group uni...

(within the project URB) CIDADE is a TV series that takes place in the diverse, urbanistically chaotic and multicultural periphery of Lisbon. Each episode has for landscape and dramatic background the everyday-life in the social housing neighborhoods...

In 1974, after years of civil war, the Portuguese and their descendants fled the colony of Angola where groups working for independence gradually claim their territory back. A tribal girl discovers love and death when her path crosses that of a young...

The Ave Valley is, for more than a century, a territory seized by an imposing industry. Amongst ruins and operating factories, we descend the river on a journey alongside the banks of the present, unveiling the marks of the past....

"I've been on this cliff for almost a year, here on the lookout. Always aware of the sea and the enemy, even though I've never seen him. The man riding a horse gave me a new order, to be even more on alert, waiting for a mirage, for a ghost that will...

They all say that you killed an Angel. Who says that ? They. It’s not an Angel. It isn’t ? No. It’s a rare bird, just like you and me....

“Campo de Marte” (The Field of Mars) was in the ancient times Rome’s training arena for war. At the outskirts of Lisbon, “Campo” hosts today Europe’s largest military base. In this place military troops train fictional missions, astronomy aficionados...

Cunning and slender, harassed and on the run, Reynard is a metaphor of a never ending obsession with each breath, each gesture, each thought. Marta seeks in the emptiness of her body a way to arrive to her inner essence, in an abstract search of a fr...

A 70-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman share a candid and twisted relationship with a deadline. Trapped in one room, Antonio and Catarina are negotiating the terms of their relationship....

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This documentary portrait covers all the themes of Daveau’s rich life: from her field research and private life to feminism and the influence of the modern age on family relationships and science. Her passionate life is examined in detail in an inexh...

A journey through Lisbon’s suburbs through the lives of a handful of musicians establishing their place to exist in a city of complex identity struggles. Different generations and backgrounds meet, Angola to São Tome, Cabo Verde and Guine Bissau repr...