Country: Portugal
Year: 2012
Duration: 111'


Lisbon. Pilar, a middle-aged woman with a heart of gold, is worried about her elderly next-door neighbor, who lives alone with the help of a caregiver from Cape Verde. Elegant and stubborn, Aurora has been acting strangely recently: besides suspecting that her maid is a witch, she seems to have given up all desire to live, except for her passion for gambling, which is eating up her meager savings. When she is admitted to hospital, Aurora turns to Pilar for help and gives her the name and address of a man. But the man arrives too late, and he reveals that he was a lover of Aurora’s, back when they both lived in colonial Africa. A passionate love buried by the passage of time, but which comes back to life in the man’s memories.

Biography

film director

Miguel Gomes

Miguel Gomes (Lisbon, Portugal, 1972) worked as a film critic from 1996 to 2000, writing for the daily “Público.” In 1999, he directed his first short, Entretanto, which was presented at the Torino Film Festival, as was his next short, Cântico das Criaturas (2006) and the feature-length Tabu (2012). That same year, the Festival dedicated a complete retrospective to his opus in the section Onde. Gomes debuted in feature films with A Cara que Mereces (2004), which was followed by Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto (2008), presented at the Quinzaine des réalisateurs in Cannes, and Tabu (2012), which won the Alfred Bauer Award and the FIPRESCI Award at the Berlin Film Festival. In 2013, he participated at the Venice Film Festival with the short Redemption, and he returned to the Quinzaine des réalisateurs with As Mil e uma Noites. 

FILMOGRAFIA

Entretanto (cm, 1999), Inventário de Natal (cm, 2000), 31 (cm, 2001), Kalkitos (cm, 2002) Pre-Evolution Soccer’s One Minute After a Golden Goal in the Master League (cm, 2003), A Cara que Mereces (2004), Cântico das Criaturas (cm, 2006), Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto (2008), Tabu (2012), Redemption (cm, 2013), Arabian Nights (2015).

Declaration

film director

“I think I am like a collector [...]. There are some things that stay with me, they can be stories that someone told me or songs or people I know who I have the desire to film... but at the beginning I’m just collecting all these things and I don’t know that altogether it will make a film.”

Cast

& Credits

regia, montaggio/directorfilm editing Miguel Gomes
sceneggiatura/screenplay Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo fotografia/cinematography Rui Poças
montaggio/film editing Telmo Churro
scenografia/production design Bruno Duarte
costumi/costume design Silvia Grabowski
suono/sound Vasco Pimentel
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters Teresa Madruga (Pilar), Laura Soveral (Aurora da vecchia/old Aurora), Ana Moreira (Aurora da giovane/young Aurora), Henrique Espírito Santo (Ventura da vecchio/old Ventura), Carloto Cotta (Ventura da giovane/young Ventura), Isabel Cardoso (Santa), Ivo Müller (marito di Aurora/Aurora’s husband), Manuel Mesquita (Mário)
produttori/producers Luís Urbano, Sandro Aguilar
produzione/production O Som e a Fúria, Komplizen Film, Gullane, Shellac Sud coproduttori/coproducers Janine Jackowski, Jonas Dornbach, Maren Ade, Fabiano Gullane, Caio Gullane, Thomas Ordonneau
distribuzione, vendita all’estero/distribution, world sales The Match Factory
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