Carloto Cotta

Diamantino, Portugal’s (the world’s!) top football player, becomes embroiled in a genetic experiment and a conspiracy to leave the EU, in this joyful, postmodern political fantasy.

In Portugal - one European country in crisis- a film director proposes to build fictional stories from the miserable reality he is immersed in. However, failing to find meaning in his work, he cowardly runs away and leaves the beautiful Scheherazade to stand in his shoes. She will require enthusiasm and courage so as not to bore the King with sad stories of this country. As nights go past, restlessness leads to desolation and in turn to enchantment. Therefore Scheherazade organizes the stories she tells the King in three volumes. She begins like this: "It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that in a sad country among all countries...".

It's here that the trilogy is both at its most playful and focused. Having escaped the palace of the king, Xerazade explores a seaside landscape where she encounters, among others, a "wind genie" and a daft suitor. In this chapter, it's as if the historical backdrop, the modern world and the disparate modes of storytelling collapse into one another. Movingly and unexpectedly, the last gesture of Arabian Nights is to scale back its scope and provide a disarmingly modest and poignant grace note on which one of contemporary cinema's new masterpieces can close.

A temperamental old woman, her Cape Verdean maid and a neighbour devoted to social causes live on the same floor of a Lisbon apartment building. When the old lady dies, the other two learn of an episode from her past: a tale of love and crime set in an Africa straight from the world of adventure films.

In 19th-century Macedonia, a young girl is kidnapped and then transformed into a witch by an ancient spirit. Curious about life as a human, the witch accidentally kills a peasant in the nearby village and then takes her victim's shape to live life in her skin. Her curiosity ignited, she continues to wield this horrific power to understand what it means to be human.

After a heart attack, retired general Jose Mendieta is haunted by his past work aiding a CIA-backed campaign of political repression in Latin America.