João Salaviza

To Our Friends (2025)

An intimate documentary exploring friendship, resilience, and love among a group of young people in Madrid. Through a cinéma vérité approach, the film captures their struggles, aspirations, and moments of joy amid economic uncertainty. A central thread ...

The Messenger (2024)

Fulfilling her work as a bailiff in Salvador, Íris delivers warrants and is often forced to execute orders that go directly against what she believes in. The job torments her. One day, with the disappearance of an activist after the execution of a warrant ...

The Buriti Flower (2024)

Through her child's eyes, Patpro will go through three periods of the history of her indigenous people, in the heart of the Brazilian forest. Tirelessly persecuted, but guided by their ancestral rites, their love of nature and their fight to preserve their ...

The Dead and the Others (2019)

Denying his duty and in order to escape a crucial process of becoming a shaman, Ihjãc runs away to the city. Far from his people and culture, he faces the reality of being an indigenous in contemporary Brazil. ...

Russa (2018)

Russa returns to Bairro do Aleixo, in Oporto, visiting her sister and friends with whom she celebrates her son's birthday. In this short encounter, Russa returns to her neighbourhood's collective memory, where three of the five towers still exist. ...

Elon Doesn't Believe in Death (2017)

As he does every single day, Elon goes to meet his wife at her workplace, but she is not there. He doesn't find her at home as well, so he starts to retrace the path Madalena makes daily. In the morning after, Elon goes to the police station and files a re ...

High Cities of Bone (2017)

Karlon, born in Pedreira dos Húngaros (a slum in the outskirts of Lisbon) and a pioneer of Cape Verdean creole rap, runs away from the housing project to which he had been relocated. ...

Cerro Negro (2012)

Developing from an idea of diptych, the story of Anajara and Allison is told from two perspectives in continuity. If late night work complicates the life of one of them, the incarceration in jail of the other determines a cycle of separation. Salaviza's sk ...

Rafa (2012)

Rafa is a 13 years old kid concerned with his mother, held in a police station for driving without a license. The director shows a day in the life of a teenager who lives on a problematic area and discovers that her mother was arrested because of an autom ...

Strokkur (2011)

In the beginning the idea was to make something from nothing, in a neutral and unknown place. Collect images and sounds instead of producing them. The camera, the microphone and the mini-amplifier: tools that take away and then give back. We defined a rul ...

Casa Na Comporta (2011)

Casa Na Comporta is one of four films commissioned to different directors for the Portuguese architecture national exhibition at the Venice Biennale. ...

Hotel Müller (2010)

An homage to Pina Bausch. ...

Arena (2009)

A young man under house arrest spends his time in the best way he can by making some tattoos. His relative peace is strangely disturbed when he's attacked and robbed by three kids from the neighborhood. From then on, he'll try to find the kids who took his ...

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009)

On a train to Algarve, a young man recounts to a fellow passenger his past relationship with an eccentric young woman. ...

Cães de Caça (2008)

In a tightly framed slice of suburban Lisbon, young characters grapple with juvenile bravado and the unspoken tensions of masculinity, framed through Salaviza's spare, observational lens. ...

Dedicated To The One I Love (2008)

The Summer of Rita M. (2006)

One week before the university entrance exam João has given up. Rita, his girlfriend and a straight-A surfer girl, is determined not only to make him study, but to make him pass the exam and get him into college. The problems arise when she fails to get i ...

Two People (2004)

A man is seen by a prostitute in his home. They try to communicate. But the loneliness they both carry creates a gap between them, enabling that communication. ...

Lumiar (2004)

In the Interstices of Reality or The Cinema of António de Macedo (2016)

He was the most prolific within the New Portuguese Cinema generation. He would try western spaghetti, esoteric allegory, supernatural, and science-fiction. Without state subsidies, he would quit filmmaking in the 1990s. Who remembers António de Macedo? ...

A Portuguese Film (2011)

A documentary about the world of portuguese cinema, with interviews with some critics and directors. ...

Querença (2004)

In mid-September 1992, journalist Guida Fontes have to go to Luanda to cover the elections in Angola. In the meantime, she had committed herself to discovering and interviewing the poet Júlio Vera. In 1988, he wrote a series of poems in which he mysteriou ...

When It Thunders (2000)

The relationship between António and Ruth ends unexpectedly when Ruth decides to live with Pedro, António's best friend. António doesn't fight back and lets himself drown. From the woods come Violeta and Gaspar, two strange beings, a mixture of fairies, ...

Da Invicta ao Sonoro (1997)

L'Enfant du secret (1996)

Blanche, a social worker living in Southern France is assigned the case of a five year old deaf boy, who is found by a Gypsy lady after having been abandoned and tied to a shed near her trailer. The boy's life is in danger apparently because he is related ...

La leyenda de Balthasar el Castrado (1996)

At the end of the seventeenth century, in Naples, still dominated by the Spaniards, a young pupil, Balthasar,is castrated to preserve the purity and beauty of his voice. The Duchess dies and her son, the Duke of Arcos, takes charge of the inheritance, whic ...

Poor George (1993)

One night Jorge will meet with a Japanese industrialist, who will allow him to abandon his teaching position and resume his chemical work. However, when he gets home he finds a person there. ...