17-year-old Marta lives with her parents in a high-rise on the edge of Lisbon. Her mother works two jobs and is gone till late at night, while her unemployed father suffers from depression. The icy atmosphere and distance within the family is only amplified by acute financial worries, causing all three to suffer silently in their own separate crises. Pressed to the margin of the city, they repress even their own most fundamental feelings, and the unwanted pregnancy of Marta’s friend Júlia renders the fragile situation even shakier.

Teresa Villaverde finds a way to stage the existential voids in these everyday lives of humans living under the weight of poverty, by cultivating a form of distanced closeness to her characters, with curiosity, time, empathy, acknowledgement and an awareness of the structural dimensions of their fates.

Teresa Villaverde was born in Lisbon/Portugal in 1966. In the 80s she worked as an actress, co-author and co-director in the Theater Group of the School of Fine Arts in Lisbon. She participated as an actress in the film À FLOR DO MAR, by João César Monteiro and worked in the set of Paulo Rocha’s DESEJADO as continuity supervisor. In the early 90s she began working as a director, always writing her own scripts. All her films had world premieres at A festivals such as Cannes, Venice and Berlin. Furthermore, she was appointed to the juries at numerous film festivals.

Filmography (selection): 1991 A IDADE MAIOR, 1994 TRÊS IRMÃOS, 1996 O AMOR NÃO ME ENGANA, 1998 OS MUTANTES, 2003 A FAVOR DA CLARIDADE, 2006 TRANSE, 2017 COLO, 2018 GALILEO’S THERMOMETER, 2019 SIX PORTRAITS OF PAIN