Luís Miguel Cintra

The Life of Mirrors is one of the sections of the exhibition Luis Miguel Cintra - Small Theatre of the World. A commission by Serralves Foundation to Regina Guimarães and Saguenail, and constructed after an unpublished interview with Luis Miguel Cintra, this film is the result of a long and painstaking exercise of selecting and editing excerpts from films by Manoel de Oliveira in which Cintra participates as an actor. In this way, The Life of Mirrors is a reflective, retrospective essay film, which opens the Carte Blanche, thus establishing a gateway to Luis Miguel Cintra's cinematographic and cinephile career.

A renowned symbol of Portuguese interventionist theatre, Cornucópia emerged from the darkness of fascism to fight dictatorship on stage. Among the classics, a project is born and dies, but one face remains emblematic: Luís Miguel Cintra, who shared his art with the constant complicity of set designer Cristina Reis. Together, guided by images, they bear witness, telling this story.

Two friends cannot find their way around the city of Lisbon. It is a film, which could be a poem, that has no genre and serves as a bridge between the narratives, forms, and dreams of the characters they encounter.

Thirty-something Vítor still lives with his mother, Fátima, in his grandmother Júlia’s apartment. Fátima is a hairdresser with a quiet disposition who, at night, fantasises about the policeman who has just moved in next door. By day, Vítor is a lowly employee on a TV show. But at night, he dons his neighbour’s uniform to win the favour and satisfy the desires of a boy he’s met online. In her retirement home, Júlia is unable to sleep at night and has long forgotten what drugs she is meant to be taking. She misses her dead husband, who manifests himself in the body of a living friend, and gets involved in her daily activities. Through these characters, Diogo Costa Amarante constructs a fascinating portrait of lives lived while desires remain unrealised.

Theatre is life, as movement is life. In "Truth or Dare?", Sofia Marques sets off in search of her friend and actor Luis Miguel Cintra; and Cintra is in search of himself, both excavating the matter and memory of theatre, the matter and memory of life. At home surrounded by statuary and by his Porto, by the sea and in Spain where he was born, on a stage of light and shadow, in the films of Manoel de Oliveira or in the poems of Ruy Belo.

Gonçalo and his friends set off on a mission to his deceased grandfather’s house, in the north of Portugal. There, the memories of the past open up new perspectives into the future.

The evocation of light in the cinema leads the Character of the Man of Light to ponder over it, over its essence and its multiple manifestations in a revisitation of geographical places and memories.

'A Távola de Rocha' enables us to enter Paulo Rocha’s universe, to gather memories and find, within his personal and professional relationships, a key to decipher some of the unknown symbols and allusions contained in his films.

On a rainy night, a sad man leaves his home to deliver a letter to someone who recently left him. At a corner, he meets a woman who warns him about the slippery road. This is how I met Diana. Suffering from a heartbreak, Gonçalo falls from his motorbike.

The earth, life and death, indifference and affection, abandonment, faith. Words and silence, light and shadow, the endless survival, the inability to love. A trilogy set in 2017, 2028, 2037. Three women of different generations and backgrounds cross paths; their tentative steps to fully exist evoke fragments of stories, bringing real life experiences and events into each character.