Menu
© 2026 The Couch Critic
Browse 34 movies from Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
Jan 2014
Documentary about the artistic creation in Cape Verde, with the director following, during the preparation of one of the editions of the Mindelact festival, the rehearsals and backstage of the artists. It focuses on the birth and discussion of ideas in groups, looking for ways to express a new identity. The strength of Orlando Pantera stands out, whose premature death at the age of 33 took out of Cape Verde one of the most promising creators of recent times.
Jan 2001
In a remote rural area, a woman on the run has a supernatural encounter surrounded by enigmatic sounds. As she immerses herself in that reality, she is confronted with unexpected phenomena that her rational mind cannot understand.
Jul 2024
A documentary that aims at highlighting the daily lives of death people and what a "deaf identity" entails.
Sep 2015
A November day in Porto, in a square where skaters jump up a flight of stairs. Three characters share a moment, which is divided into three subjective shots and which, without dialogue, are intended to characterize them emotionally. The idea of shared love is called into question.
May 2024
A story of obsessive love and surreal entropy between two people who surrender to absolute desire.
May 2025
Maria Gouveia is a character with a secret past, which she intends to hide at all costs. In her eagerness to hide that past, she commits a homicide, witnessed by a man whose existence she is unaware of. That man is the lawyer Óscar Summavielle, who manages to become her defense lawyer and, constructing an alibi for her, proves in court that she is innocent, although he knows she is guilty. Marta and Óscar are led into a game of passion that will take them beyond all conventions...
Nov 1992
Have you ever had a crush on the man frisking you at the airport? What would you do to get strip searched in that back room without being sent to jail? Frequent Traveler brilliantly and silently explores the answer to this question.
Jul 2008
A picture of daily life punctuated by silence. In a village in the north, the daily routine of three families. Glimpses of Isabel, her eyes turned towards the future; for the others, living is the only meaning of life. The camera freezes moments of life through the movement of things in time, values and silence.
Nov 1985
How to represent an artistic intention without reducing it to a description? How to do it preserving the intentionality of the gestus in an ambiguous andsubjective space where the individualism of the artistic perspective is set. “my maladresse…” proposes a viewpoint over Ana Jotta’s universe. An analogous portrait of her relations as an artist is created, setting parallel questions, as hermeneutics possibility and art as a value system. The link relating the trio (artist and director’s deuce) balances between familiarity, master and apprentice, subject and object; the distance and authority of the one behind the camera spreading light around artisticurgencies concerning how Work and Life overlay in this unquiet chase of the greater purpose: a search for consolation in the holy_burlesque of existential functionalism. A documental laboratory of reflexive limits.
Jan 2009
Maduro, D. Lourenço manages to take away Joao Bolandas, to be with the woman, Florinda, his old love, that returns that feeling to him. Simão discovers the mother's connection with D. Lourenço and, from then on, only one desire guides him: to kill Florinda's lover.
Jul 1984
A man goes on a journey for a slice of apple pie.
Apr 2018
No matter how calm the surface of the ocean appears to be, each time we cross the line that divides land and water we enter an unknown and unexpected world. Does our world remain the same when we come back on shore?
Feb 2007
A story about doomed love between two people from different worlds and the impact in their lives.
Nov 1979
Oct 2013
The tribulations of two friends who, in despair, start begging from door-to-door, and are given a bundle including, literally, a pair of deadman's shoes.
Jan 1970
I haven’t seen my father for a decade. Together with my colleagues from cinema school, I return to the place where I was born, and a reunion seems inevitable.” Miguel de Jesus
Oct 2019
Maria Helena, 57 years old, lives in the small village of Lourel, on the outskirts of Lisbon. Her days are divided by the several chores imposed by household keeping: floor-washing, bathroom cleaning, doing the laundry. This is the story of a housewife who wished to fly faraway but didn’t, perhaps, as she puts it, because she was born “before time”. She goes through the daily routine with all she has left: memories and songs from another time, from a revolution (April, 1974), that fill in the soundtrack of her world and of her days.
Jan 2004
The plan of issues, since 1962, an alive and continuous legacy of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Jan 2017
Jan 1998