The City of Lisbon sleeps, but there are still some lit windows. One of these windows is Mercury—a boy, a God. Every night, he stays up collecting messages and recordings from different human dreams. Real people describe some of their recurring or most memorable dreams: scary nightmares, love stories, premonitions. Through accessing these personal and deep dreams as if by magic, and creating a cosmic connection with these characters, Mercury learns what it’s like to be human and to feel.

António Napoleão was my paternal grandfather. I was barely three when he passed, perhaps younger, and so I hold no true memory of him. Over the years, I have woven a fabricated remembrance: images and stories of a man I never knew. This documentary stems from that absence, exploring how the imaginary fills the void left by the unremembered. It is a search that dwells between reality and fiction, between the silence of forgetting and the urge to remember.

Anxiety started consuming the muscles of my trapezius. I gradually stopped being able to swallow without thinking, because swallowing became forced. Amidst some exams to rule out bigger issues, or issues of a different, more tangible nature, one of the first hypotheses gained strength: finally, anxiety and 'nerves' began to eat away at my body. Pássaro Azul is both a letter to my ancestors and a quest to understand what torments me and causes such acute anxiety – and how all these seemingly unrelated pieces can intertwine.

Minus the flesh, stays the bone.

“See you next year!” a Portuguese fire warden says as he dismantles his control equipment at the end of the season. Humans and nature in southern Europe may be used to forest fires, but that does not change the facts: The ever more massive conflagrations are caused by climate change. We have long been living in the age of fire.
In the Portuguese interior, a forest fire has just devastated a large area. Wounded nature is silent, not a single bird is heard, only the wind that makes the charred tree trunks rustle. But the vegetation recovers astonishingly fast. Where all life seemed to be gone, greenery soon sprouts from the ruined trees. The residents of the affected region are engaged in the reconstruction with great respect for their natural environment. Because plants, too, are sentient creatures. In quiet, almost melancholic, but also hopeful images, the film pays tribute to the strength of the trees and illustrates how essential it would be for humanity to learn to live in harmony with nature again. bone.