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Greek-Portuguese writer and director Paulo Marinou-Blanco (Empty Hands, Goodnight Irene) screened Dreaming of Lions, his absurdist black comedy film about assisted suicide and euthanasia, in the 10:30 p.m. slot at the fourth edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival on Friday night. But the cinema in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s Culture Square, its “new home of film,” was packed, and the audience reacted with much applause after experiencing the tragicomic rollercoaster ride that the movie provides.

Brazil’s Denise Fraga (The Other End) leads the cast of the film, which premiered at the recent Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, alongside 2022 European Film Promotion Shooting Star João Nunes Monteiro from Portugal. Asun Planas, Dinarte Freitas, António Durães, Alexander Tuji, Victoria Guerra, Sandra Faleiro, Joana Ribeiro (The Man Who Fell to Earth), and Roberto Bomtempo round out the cast.

Dreaming of Lions is the story of Gilda (Fraga), a terminally...

Exclusive: Stephanie Vogt is set as a lead in Glória, Netflix’s upcoming historical spy thriller drama series from SPi productions and Rtp.

Written by Pedro Lopes and directed by Tiago Guedes, Glória takes place in the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, in the small village of Glória do Ribatejo, where Raret is located, an American broadcasting center that broadcasts Western propaganda to the Eastern Bloc. João Vidal, an engineer from families linked to the Estado Novo, but recruited by the Kgb, will take on several high-risk espionage missions that could change the course of Portuguese and world history.

Vogt will play Anne. The wife of James, Anne comes from a wealthy and liberal family. She is a Harvard grad in International Relations, recruited by the CIA.

The ensemble cast includes Portuguese and international actors, including Miguel Nunes, Carolina Amaral, Victoria Guerra, Afonso Pimentel, Adriano Luz, Joana Ribeiro,...

The opening of “The Domain” is a classic mid-length widescreen shot of a solitary tree silhouetted against the sky. The camera slowly pans left to reveal a second tree, with a man hanging from a branch. This too feels fairly familiar, if disturbing, and one watches imagining that director Tiago Guedes is using such archetypal images to then play with the form, or do something unusual with the subsequent nearly three-hour running time. Instead, his sprawling family epic spanning from 1946 to 1991 largely shifts from the derivative to the banal. Designed like a meaty novel in which Portugal’s political fortunes impact a privileged family of landowners,

Guedes (“Noise”) points to Westerns and some melodramas like Vincente Minnelli’s “Home From the Hill” as major influences, which demonstrably act as templates with added political overtones. Certainly the way the tug-of-war between dictatorship, revolution and capitalism batters the independent-minded Fernandes family does...