As in the majority of Penalva’s films, the original text for Kitsune (The spirit of the fox, 2001), appears in the film as the subtitling for the translation from the language in which the film is made – in this case, Japanese. In Japanese folk tales the fox is the scariest of all animals since it can transform itself into a human being and into other animals and its shrewdness is the subject of many stories. Kitsune is a film where nothing is quite what it seems; it was entirely filmed in Madeira but the voiceover was done in Japanese by two actors, in Tokyo. It is more than a film about foxes. The look, what you can see and what you cannot, and the magic power of transformation are its real subjects.

336 is the official number of rivers that run into Lake Baikal in Siberia, from which only one comes out. However, that number may not even be correct. The film questions the truth, in its multiple versions, telling stories that are transformed while they are being told by the memory – always fragile – 336 PEK weaves narratives that unfold without end. The viewer is, maybe more than in any other Joao Penalva´s film, lead to participate in the extreme slowness of a language of beliefs, legends and suspicion of its own authenticity.

Written by João Penalva, with quotations from Thomas Mann (Der Erwählte, 1951), O Sineiro has the formal particularity of its image being made out of the same video material being shown back and forth, almost completely annulling the movement of the river’s current which occupies the centre of the image. The movement is then taken into another imagined film that the spirit of the story teller gives us.

Filmed in Bristol, on the Avon river and on the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the famous bridge which for its height attracts every year dozens of suicidal people, O Rouxinol Branco is an allegory to death as a journey, using the language of silent films with intertitles and literarily that of fairy tales. O Rouxinol Branco, of all Penalva’s films, is the one in which its soundtrack could be heard as a music piece, independent from the film it was created for.

O Rugir de Leões was filmed in Berlin, in the frozen lake of the Grunewald forest, a place marked by the sinister German history of Second World War. Although spoken in Mandarin, it could be seen as a documentary about the leisure pursuits of the upper classes that live in the forest and walk their dogs, if it wasn’t for the strangeness of everything that is being told. Between the language of dreams and a reality literally “painted”, everything that seems safe becomes, in the voice of the narrator, another parallel and dangerous world.