João Pedro Rodrigues

Quote:
Young and handsome Sergio works the night shift as a trash collector in Lisbon, Portugal. He can’t force himself to connect with his pretty female co-worker Fatima, who displays an avid interest in him, so instead Sergio roams the city with the trash company’s pet dog. Eventually Sergio becomes fascinated with a sleek motorcycle, and then also its owner, João – a young man totally indifferent to Sergio. The frustrated trash collector’s surfacing sexual desires unleash his darkest impulses, sending him down a dangerous path of violence, depravity and degradation.Read More »

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Fernando, a solitary ornithologist, is looking for black storks, a species under threat, along a remote river in northern Portugal, when he is swept away by the rapids. Rescued by a couple of Chinese pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela, he plunges into an eerie and dark forest, trying to get back on his track. But gradually, as he encounters unexpected and uncanny obstacles and people who put him to the test, Fernando is impelled to extreme actions which transform him. Little by little, he becomes a different man, inspired, multi-faceted and finally, totally enlightened.Read More »

From 7 to 25 April, 18 days of confinement during which a male blackbird takes care and guarantees the safety of its young, until they release the nest.Read More »

Once upon a time there was a war In the darkness of the night, a young soldier goes AWOL. Tonia, a veteran transsexual in Lisbons drag shows, watches the world around her crumble. The competition from younger artists threatens her star status. Under pressure from her young boyfriend Rosário to assume her female identity, the sex change operation that will transform her into a woman, Tonia struggles against her deeply-held religious convictions. If, on the one hand, she wants to be the woman that Rosário so desires, on the other, she knows that before God she can never be that woman. And her son, whom she abandoned when he was a child, now a deserter, comes looking for her. Read More »

Quote:
February 2011, Red Market, Macao’s famous food market. Two directors, a common look. The gestures and the routines, between life and death. In memoriam Jane Russell (June 21, 1921 – February 28, 2011).Read More »

Synopsis
João Pedro Rodrigues films the holiday journey of an emigrant family from Paris to their homeland in Trás-os-Montes. Footage from the couple’s daily life in Paris – he is a cobbler and she is a janitor – combined with records from their car journey through French and Spanish highways to Portugal and with moments of their holidays.Read More »

Synopsis
The silent darkness of the bedroom is broken by a greetings message on the answering-machine. A sudden awakening for Chico on his thirtieth birthday. What a mess! Too late to meet his girlfriend, too late for the meeting at Expo ’98, and, even worse, an outsize hangover. But that’s not all. Lying next to him in bed is a young man with whom he has spent the night. He must now pick up the threads of his everyday life. Meanwhile his companion from the night before, with blue eyes and feline body, wanders around the house feeling both curious and amused, with the restless happiness of a twenty-year old with all the time in the world to spare. It is his hunger for life that, in an undeclared game, will transform what could otherwise have been a normal birthday morning for Chico…Read More »

Synopsis
Due to the EXPO 98 promotion campaign the Portuguese capital city appeared quite often in the French media. During their Summer holidays the following year, João Pedro Rodrigues once again films this emigrant family in France during their journey through Lisbon’s old districts, its outskirts, and their visit to Expo or Luz Stadium.Read More »

Synopsis
China walks towards the Martim Moniz district, in Lisbon. When she passes the children scream: “China, China!”. China is going to fly. To escape far away at dawn. She just wants to be happy. But China drinks her own poison. She drinks it all. Sometimes the air seems loaded with evil and the purgatory is a kindergarden.Read More »