A film adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel "Hard Times" set in a Portuguese industrial town of the 1980s.

1981 film directed by António-Pedro Vasconcelos

Dina (Maria Santiago) is a teenager brought up by her grandmother, employed as a housekeeper for a fairly well-off family. Since Dina only has her grandmother, she spends her time fantasizing about her life and reading comic-book love stories -- activities that do nothing to improve her dim perspective of reality. Due to these handicaps and her own inexperience, she gets involved with Django (Luis Lucas), a shady character who decides to use her as bait to attract men and then rob them. One day when both are in a taxi with robbery in mind, the driver gets suspicious so Django shoots him, and so does Dina. She escapes and runs away -- though it seems like she has learned too little too late. This story unfolds against a time of upheaval in Portugal (mid-1970s) when the military government is formulating a constitution and social changes are happening everywhere.

A story about doomed love between two people from different worlds and the impact in their lives. Based on the novel of the same name by Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco.

In Portuguese Africa in 1973, a small platoon of soldiers is stranded, prey both to an unseen guerrilla enemy and to their own doubts about the war they are waging. Twelve years on, an elderly couple, still mourning the death of their son in the African campaign, make one last visit to their surviving children, now grown up and living in Lisbon. Botelho's delicately mesmerising film interweaves these two simple stories, and achieves a contemplative serenity not unlike that of Ozu; hardly surprising or inappropriate in that the contemporary story is indeed a Portuguese update of the Japanese master's Tokyo Story. As the reunion gives rise to painful memories and barely expressed tension, the film charts the family's disappointments and losses with a dry-eyed melancholy, gently proposing a stoic resignation as a response to life's vicissitudes. Botelho never quite matches the emotional power of his mentor. Nevertheless, this is one fine film; watch it peacefully and patiently, and be moved.

Lisbon, 1989. A middle-aged poor man, tormented by an illness, lives in a cheap room in a family boarding house, in the old section of the city's waterfront.

This Portuguese drama examines the daily life minutiae and intrigues of two scions of society in the rural village where they live. One is a wealthy landowner, the other a widowed aristocrat who lives in a world of her own. "Starting off from a fine novel by Carlos de Oliveira, Fernando Lopes doesn't so mush reconstitute a story, but rather defines an atmosphere parallel to that which exists in the literary work. The erosion of time, the crumbling of an epoch, the decline of a stately home, the disintegration of emotions: the film version of A Bee in the Rain talks about all these things, using a language that is sparse and unpolished, fascinating and at the same time repulsive in its disturbing silence"

Nineteen-year-old Julio heads to Lisbon from the provinces and gets a job as a shoemaker for his uncle Raul. But when he meets Ilda, a confident young housemaid who becomes a regular shop visitor, his working-class values collide with the bourgeois trappings of modern life.