An ice-cream seller lusts after the female employees in his shop.

A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the convent. These rather ironic paradoxes turn this fairytale into a philosophical fable.

Estefânia is an old, rich, strict catholic woman, and when she sets her eyes on a couple of servants who have no means to bring up properly their youngest son, António, she decides to move her influences in order to make a priest out of him. The parents accept it, the local priest and even the Seminar's rector accept it, and António accepts it - if not for piety, for obeyance to his parents. Once time goes by, and António is out of rural misery and into the prison-like system of a seminar, doubts and anguishes mount within him.

A group of innocent hostages is left to their own deaths facing a clockwork bomb, while the whole country watches them on the TV.

Cristina is twenty years old. Her father was declared missing in action during the war in Angola many years before. One day in church the girl meets a man about fifty years old who tries various times, unsuccessfully, to make the sign of the cross. The man is called Cristovão. A few days later the two meet again. The man offers to help her look for her father. A relationship based on memories and confessions is formed between them. But soon they each return to their own solitude.

João Vuvu, lives alone in a house that requires regeneration but due to being alone he is unable to do the work. On his son's release from prison and João's ensuing deception triggers a series of somber events.

During World War II, during a misty morning, near a fishermen's village, four children come across two RAF pilots ejected from a plane that crashed in the sea.

One bad thing never comes alone, says the people. The village Estrela is threatened by the waters of the new Alqueva dam. It will become an "island". But, as one bad thing never comes alone, the daily lives of the inhabitants of this small mountain village are changed by the death of Adriano. "In order to create, I destroyed myself; I have so much externalized within myself that within me I exist only outwardly. I am the living scene where various actors perform various plays." (from Livro do Desassossego by Fernando Pessoa), as Adriano liked to quote Adriano. He committed suicide on the day of the village feast, hanging himself in the main square. For Adriano, the main square of the village has long been the center of the world. Adriano felt surrounded, depressed, unable to escape his destiny. "No one can stop a man who travels with suicide on his lapel" Adriano repeated to Lisete, always to the point of exhaustion.

Concerns an Irish woman, Cathy (Pauline Cadell), who dearly loves her Portuguese lawyer husband, Pedro (Rui Morisson); however, unbeknownst to her, he engages in one tryst after another. Cathy soon finds herself trying to help a young delinquent get off heroin, while the youth's desperate mother joins a weird religious cult. In other segments, an elderly man is nearly driven mad with grief at the loss of his granddaughter in a train station, while a down-and-out jeweler ushers the young girl to a hotel room.

After having been in jail, Manuel becomes a bullfighter following dangerously his father's steps.

A version of Ben Johnson's play: A Venetian swindler goes from town to town pretending to be a dying millionaire in order to attract (and dispose of) greedy "friends".

The story of Father Antonio Vieira, a 17th-century Portuguese priest who lived in Brazil and worked for better treatment of the Indians and to abolish slavery.

Tó, a black boy from Zona J, a tough neighborhood in Lisbon, falls in love with a white girl, Carla. Tó dreams of living in Angola and taking Carla with him. However, the reality the two teens are in complicates their plans...

Rui Sequeira, a former fighter in the Colonial War, resident of a small village of Alentejo, celebrates another anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in the company of his wife and her daughter, the young Sara, with which he has a not so good relationship. On the night of the celebrations, the death of a friend forever alters his live, waking up a whole past long dormant.

Chased out of the Spanish court, a nobleman uses the services of his valet to take revenge. He orders him to seduce the queen in order to better compromise her.

Catalyst in the story of crossed paths is a 1957 Ford Fairlane being driven through Portugal’s Alentejo region to a new owner. Film’s overly protracted opening has car’s drivers (Filipe Cochofel, Antonio Pedro Figueiredo) joy riding the night away until the roadster breaks down. Momentum picks up at sunrise with their attempts to fix the car. A retired mechanic-turned-beekeeper with a heart condition (Canto e Castro) does the trick and convinces Figueiredo to take him cross-country on a motorbike to look up an old friend. Cochofel and the mechanic’s alarmed niece (Maysa Marta) follow in pursuit. The old man dies peacefully on the road, but Figueiredo, having wholeheartedly grasped his deliverance mission, keeps going.

The story of a family of bull fighters.

When 12 year old Alex runs away, his grandmother ask her 6 friends for help and follow the kid from Paris to Lisbon.

"The Butterfly in the Cage" is a novel by Luís Filipe Costa adapted to film by the author, it follows the daily lives of several people connected to newspapers, television, film and theater in Lisbon, in the days leading up to the revolution of 25 April 1974.