Happy Birthday | IN PRE-PRODUCTION
Achievement grade
This story reveals the imaginary and mythology of the São Miguel, Azorean and Portuguese community, forever transformed by the events that took place between 1974 and 1975. The universe of cinema is known for challenging the collective consciousness over time, and so, in its own way, this film intends to do just that by inviting several generations to explore this plot together, restoring the value and curiosity that this period deserves in our history and time.
The imagery that this film builds is based on a cheerful, rebellious, innocent, adventurous, complicit and passionate side that is proposed as an alternative to the recurrent melancholic vision associated with the live on the islands.
On the other hand, when the protagonists meet 30 years later, the atmosphere of Ponta Delgada is that of their time in the world. A normal city, like many other medium-sized Portuguese cities, but with an insular dimension and unique social microcosms.
Cristina, a character who returns to the island, is an artist who comes to exhibit at the invitation of a gallery, an invitation from a community of her time that claims the contemporaneity that deserve. Guilherme, the one who dreamed as big as she did, but who stayed behind, feels confronted with his past and, like so many others, with his dormant desires.
The moment of reunion raises universal existentialist questions, natural to this age group, whether you live in the countryside or in the city, in a country or any other. What makes this story special is that it is told from the Azores, on one of the nine small islands that survive in the middle of the huge Atlantic Ocean.
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