According to Sigmund Freud: “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways”. “Umbral” materialises the moral dilemma of whether there is a cause and effect link between trauma and criminal behaviour.
A writer immerses himself in his work La muerte del payaso and becomes a hostage of impossible dreams. Between crimes and hallucinations, between the gothic nature of night and the decadence of the sand, a hopeless story is told, based on the work of Raul Brandão.
On one side, a bunch of crooks. On the other, two sisters. Nothing unites them except an idea: to relieve the bank account of an old man, who happens to be the sisters' father. The crooks devise a plan to gain his trust and swindle him. The sisters make plans for the last years of their father's life without neglecting the small detail of the inheritance. Each one in their own way, they all dream of the possibilities that the old man's money could bring them. But this one will not be easy prey.
Romeu, a corrupt cop, hires the services of Cid and Alex, to catch a notorious criminal, who left Mexico and is on his way to Galicia, Spain to find the killer of his brother, also trying to catch the same criminal is an FBI agent.
A kino-investigation about spectatorship, a continuous conversation between different kinds of spectators: which one is more cinema: Citizen Kane on a mobile phone or a football game projected in a cinema theatre? What is the cinema of uncertainty? How many kinds of amazement exist? Does fear and belief precede amazement? What are the rights and duties of the spectator? Is the essay film a manifesto against voyeurism? Should spectators be paid? What amazes the spectator of this day and age?
I am the double of the shadow of my own image. An allegory that occupies my place. This is my act of contrition. Beyond good and evil, I stand as an equation: Its result cannot be manipulated By morals or ethics. In mathematics there is no place for beliefs Just as life and death Are a certain fate.
Free adaptation of Sophocles classic tragedy “King Oedipus” crossed with Jack Kerouac's classic “On the Road”. The starting point is the loss of identity of a generation of Portuguese emigrants. Tebas tells the story of a young man who, looking for his origins, departs from Paris to Portugal with a beatnik truck driver. The film is a voyage into the strange depths of Portugal in the form of surreal road-movie.
Carolina, an aging local grande dame who works at a crossing point on the titular river, marries another late-in-life character, the dredging-boat operator Antonio. Not long after their union, she becomes intensely jealous of Antonio's fondness for their winsome goddaughter, Joana, and insinuates herself into a relationship brewing between Joana and a mystical gypsy gold salesman. Soon, tempers are flaring, mystical secrets are being revealed and death is hovering over the central characters.