'In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the belongings of each guest of the hotel and observed through the details, lives that will remain unknown', says the temporary Chambermaid in a large seaside hotel, which, unable to communicate, lives through a rigid methodology of analysis of the exterior and a ritualised quotidian. Until the uncontrollable comes to disrupts this dynamic. Hotel Royal is fragmented and incomplete mosaic of contemporary societies. It could be dubbed a film about the horrors of the soul, about voyeurs or simply about misfits.

Roberto is one of those men to whom simulation has become the greatest art. He is an unmoved, inscrutable, mysterious man. But the truth is that Robert feels an intimate, deep tedium. The boredom of those who have already exhausted all the pleasures of life. The only thing still surprising him is the fact that nothing surprises him anymore. One evening he has an overwhelming encounter with a woman. For his own bewilderment, he discovers the sublime horrors in which the woman has sank.

Francisco, behave! I Know it's your birthday, you are thirty now, it's carnival, you've dressed as a cowboy for the school party and you are surrounded by kids you hate. But that's no reason to be so annoying... Francisco, repeat after me: "Up to your 30s you have the face God has given you. After that, you get the face you deserve".

A and B get on the train, full of excitement Love and jealousy/Ashes and fire/Pain and sin Just before it leaves, C boards too. All this exists / All this is sad / All this is fado.

Oscar, a renowned hypnotherapist, uses the last moments in his hotel room to say goodbye to the vertiginous Mercedes and rid old Norberto of his bitterness.

Director Manuel Mozos draws an intimate portrait of João Bénard da Costa, programmer, critic, actor and, for 18 years, director of the Portuguese Film Museum, who passed away in 2009.

In 1917 Burma (now Myanmar), a British diplomat is set to marry his fiancée, but after a sudden panic, escapes to Singapore, sending her on what evolves into a chase across Asia.

1907. Afonso, a doctor, arrives at Principe Island to cure servants from a cocoa plantation “infected” with Banzo, nostalgia of the slaves, who are dying from starvation and suicide. The group is confined to the forest, where Afonso decides to heal them by trying to understand what is affecting their soul. Will he manage to save them?

At the age of 71, a highly regarded writer, José Cardoso Pires, suffers a major stroke and loses his memory and the ability to relate to the rest of the world. Everybody seems to defy the famous author to write another novel that recounts this adventure telling his "last story", the most conclusive of his career, the one of his accidental journey to the clear shadows territory.

Freely based on Gide ('Paludes') and Hawthorne ('Wakefield'), this is a film about a writer who never wrote anything and who blows at nightfall the breath of frost. The poem by Carlos Queiroz to which the above sentences belong is not cited in 'O som da Terra a Tremer', but the atmosphere is that, between written letters never received. Fiction within fiction, stories within stories, like those Chinese boxes in which there is always one inside another. Or the two margins of the same river, always being lateral.