“Cleópatra & António” by Diego Bragà | Portugal | 20’ | exp | 2024 | Regional Premiere
Synopsis:
War. Cleopatra and Antony lock themselves in the mausoleum while Brazil is recolonized. The word colonization comes to life and nature reacts to the destruction of the Earth from the desire for immortality. On the verge of his death, Antony asks for a ‘lullaby’. In a funeral mating dance, two historical and tyrannical characters dream, in the midst of war, of a non-binary policy of Love.
In this de-colonial and queer inspired by Shakespeare's tragic play, Egypt is Brazil and Rome is Portugal. To this ‘gran finale’, Antony will be a white European cisgender Portuguese actor and Cleopatra will be a mixed-race (Indigenous and European) trans non-binary actress from Brazil.
This fiction proposes to be a complex queer de-colonial rewriting of the two last acts of the Shakespeare play which updates the gender playfulness and political-erotic legacy of these two historical characters.
Diego Bragà:
Didirella Diego Bragà (She/Her) is a Luso-Brazilian multidisciplinary artist (filmmaker, composer and writer) who identifies as transfeminine. Born in Belo Horizonte (Brazil) and living in Lisbon since 2018. She started her professional career in theatre as a teenager. In 2021, through an autobiographical film, she received the fellowship for young creators from the Sundance Film Festival and her film Think About The Beautiful Future Ahead is currently in the Op-Docs of The New York Times. She recently finished the “Advanced Course in Cinema” organized in partnership between Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Universidade Católica do Porto. In 2020, she completed the master's degree in “Theories of Art” at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon, carrying out eight experimental short films. As singer and composer she launched two EPs and visual-albuns: “SUPERPUTA SPIRITUAL” and “Geography of love”. As writer and director she staged a total of five plays “HIT ME! (Popwitch)” (BR); “In Praise of Shame” (BR); “Shakespeare: Books to Survive” (BR); “Salomé” (BR/PT) and “Geografia do Amor” (PT). Diego got a total of five theatre awards having received the Culture award from the Brazilian Ministry of Culture (during Dilma Rousseff's government) as one of the young artists representatives of Brazilian contemporary art.
“Raw+Porous” by Ágata de Pinho | Portugal | 19’ | exp | 2025
Synopsis:
Evoking the human, the organic and the extraordinary, Raw+Porous is a story of obsessive love and a surreal surrounding entropy between two people who surrender to absolute desire.
Ágata de Pinho:
Besides continuing to work as an actor, Ágata de Pinho (Portugal, 1989) wrote and directed blue has no dimensions (AZUL), premiere in IFF Rotterdam 2022. The film was screened at several more festivals and received 5 awards (best fiction, best director, best script, best photography and best actress) at the Portuguese Short Film Awards 2023. Ágata is developing a feature film, with which they were granted a financial co-production support by the Film Institutes of Portugal and of Luxembourg.
“Soft Sea” by Sara N. Santos | Portugal | 15’ | exp | 2025
Synopsis:
A man recalls his mother. She used to tell him about a mythical place, the beach. In Soft Sea, the bathman would immerse the children in the waves amid screams and laughter, lace and swimsuits were in fashion, and people asked the sea to make them live forever. Meanwhile, the photographer walked along the sand, attempting to capture a society on the brink of decay.
Sara N. Santos:
Sara N. Santos (1992) develops a cinematic practice that combines image manipulation and critical montage, focusing on memory and the narratives that emerge from pre-existing materials. Her films, presented in national and international screenings and festivals, approach montage as a gesture that is simultaneously poetic and political, bringing together image, text, and editing as interconnected forms of creation. In 2023, she received artistic creation support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and in 2025 she participated in the Boost Program (organized by MUTIM, CIMA, and Le Collectif 50/50) at the Les Arcs Film Festival. Since 2023, she has been a lecturer at ESMAD / P.PORTO, where she teaches in the fields of cinema and photography, with a particular focus on contemporary image practices.
“Have Faith” by Leonor Patrocinio Alves, Helen Esther Aschauer | Portugal | 7’ | exp | 2025 | Regional Premiere
Synopsis:
Set against a vibrant tapestry of music and movement, Have Faith poetically explores female energy, resilience, and ancestral roots. Through striking visuals and soundscapes, the film celebrates the strength of women and their spiritual bond across generations.
Leonor Patrocinio Alves & Helen Esther Aschauer:
Leonor Patrocínio (b. 1997) is a Portuguese film director and visual artist whose work moves between cinema, music, and fashion. She explores themes of intimacy and emotion through a sensitive and contemporary aesthetic. She holds a BA in Photography and Visual Culture from IADE and an MA in Film Directing from TAI – Universidad de Artes de Madrid. She also studied at EICTV (Cuba) and Universidad Andrés Bello (Chile), where she focused on Textiles and Fashion. Leonor has collaborated with artists from the Portuguese music scene such as Diana Lima, Nenny, Bispo, and Chong Kwong, as well as with brands and institutions including AICEP. In 2024, she co-directed Tem Fé, a film that celebrates the feminine as a vital and creative force. She lives between Lisbon and Madrid, following a path that intertwines cinema, emotion, and imagery as forms of expression.
Helen Esther Aschauer is a Cuban-Austrian director and choreographer whose work moves between the worlds of cinema, fashion, and movement. With roots in dance and theatre, her storytelling is driven by rhythm, emotion, and the tension between beauty and truth. Her films often explore the human condition, especially the female perspective, through striking visual composition and an instinct for timing - blending elegance with rawness, and sensitivity with edge. Helen's short film TMWYH has just premiered and won the Generation XYZ Audience Award at the Tampere Film Festival 2026.
“The Man Cave” by Sarah Legow | Portugal | 2’ | exp, ani | 2025 | Regional Premiere
Synopsis:
A childhood memory brought to life through a mixture of archival found photos, staged scenes, and stop-motion animation, “The Man Cave” is a brief, bewildering journey inside two young girls’ shared dream of manhood.
It takes an experimental approach to personal history, veering from the serious straightforwardness of documentary to the joyful riffs of a musical. With an irreverent, childs’ eye view of sexuality, it sees the world through a proto-feminist lens: the male “safe space” of the “man cave” invaded by girls, culminating in absurd, exuberant fantasy.
Sarah Legow:
Sarah Legow (b. 1982, Youngstown, Ohio, USA) is a sculpture, video, text, and installation artist living in Porto, Portugal. Her hybrid film works, playing with the friction between the real and the animated, have appeared internationally at Athens International Film + Video Festival, Light Matter, Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival for Expanded Media, and FUSO Festival Internacional de Videoarte de Lisboa (MAAT Museum, Lisbon). Beyond cinema, her site-specific installations and public art projects have appeared with Media Art Friesland, the Every Woman Biennial, the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, and ArtSpace Bremerhaven.
She earned an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2016), BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011), and BA in Art History from Grinnell College (2005).
“Very Noble and Always Loyal City of Lisbon” by Inês Sena | Portugal | 8’ | exp, doc | 2025 | World Premiere
Synopsis:
Lisbon’s pigeons navigate a city in transformation.
Inês Sena:
Inês Sena is a Portuguese audiovisual worker and artist. She was born in 1996 in the city of Coimbra and spent her childhood between the mountains, in Fundão. In 2014 she moved to London to begin her higher education in Film at the London College of Communication, which she completed in 2018. Since 2020 she has divided her time between activism and cinema.
