The Lusophone Film Festival showcases the contemporary cinema of the Portuguese-speaking world. It is the second event of its kind in Ann Arbor and at the University of Michigan. The primary objectives of this event are to provide high visibility to the Portuguese language and its cultures at the University of Michigan and throughout the region, while contributing to program-building efforts currently underway in Portuguese.

In Elena, a young Brazilian woman travels to New York with dreams of becoming an actress. She leaves behind a childhood spent in hiding during the military dictatorship, and she leaves behind Petra, her seven-year old sister. Two decades later, Petra goes to New York to pursue acting... and in search of Elena. But the film (and the filmmaker) cannot escape the similarities between Petra and Elena’s stories, and as they overlap, they begin to blur. In the spirit of “Tarnation," Elena obliterates the line between documentary, diary, and fever dream, and is at once captivating and devastating. 

In Obra, João Carlos Ribeiro de Almeida Neto (Irandhir Santos) is beginning to feel the weight of his sizable name as he embarks on a major architectural project. Awaiting the birth of his first son, the young architect is going through a time of intense change — which is exacerbated by the discovery of some unexpected skeletons in his ancestral past. During the project's excavation, a clandestine cemetery is unearthed on a plot belonging to his family, leaving João grappling with some difficult questions about the means by which his inherited wealth and standing were accrued.