The Idalecio family is close to imploding emotionally. During the weekly Sunday drive all falls apart. It starts with a claustrophobic car trip through town. Nagging children, football on the radio, a mother in law with a sharp tongue, a new pregnancy. It is a day of unhappiness, a day that will turn around their lives. An anti-Sunday.

The apparition of a bloodstain reaffirms the relentless cycle of life, filmed in all its fragility and complexity.

Portugal, the 1970s. As the end of an era of repression approaches, a bourgeois family still in its bubble of power spends its vacation in a country house. The teenage cousins spend their days in indolence, interrupted by fits of hysteria. It will only take an introduction of an outside element – in the shape of a young man – for violence to erupt. Director David Pinheiro Vicente states that the idea of the film came from witnessing family gatherings and trying to guess the secrets, fantasies and unspoken things beyond the conversations. Part Pasolinian and sexy hide-and-seek, part political allegory (the young intruder embodies the post-Portuguese-dictatorship freedom to come), The Hunters is another solid, delightful addition to Vicente’s noteworthy work, which addresses the tension between body and spirit.

One night, a group of workers realises that the administration is stealing machines and raw materials from their own factory. As they organize to survey the equipment and block the relocation of production, they are forced to stand at their posts with no work to do, as a form of retaliation, while negotiations over general lay-offs take place. The pressure leads to a breakdown of the workers along with the world around them.