The first trailer for Ivo M. Ferreira’s thriller Projecto Global, which will have its world premiere in the Big Screen Competition section of the Rotterdam International Film Festival, has been released (below).
World distribution rights are held by The Match Factory.
The film is set in Lisbon in the 1980s. Gone are the Carnation Revolution and the euphoria of freedom that heralded Portugal’s transition to democracy. This country is facing turbulent times. Factories are closed, workers barricade themselves, and politics reigns on every street corner.
Amid deepening social tensions, the far-left armed group FP25 rises. Its members take a path of no return, leading underground lives built on bank robberies, assaults, friendship, family, and love, all under constant threat of prison or death.
They abandon everything but each other and begin to lose their own identities, while the officer fighting them faces a moral dilemma of his own.
Ferreira said: “Project Global speaks to the dreams of equality that people are forced to awaken to, and the difficulty of accepting defeat when ideas and reality collide with compromises, interests, narrow-mindedness and abandonment. We vacillate between the elation of wanting to change the world and creeping despair.”
The cast stars Jani Zhao, Rodrigo Tomas, and Jose Pimenton. The script was written by Ferreira and Helder Vella. The producers are Luis Urbano, Sandro Aguilar, and Donato Rotunno. The lead production company is O Som EA Fúria. The film is co-produced with Tarantula.
In 1998, Ferreira’s short film “O que foi” was released, and in 2002, his first feature film “Em Volta” was released. In 2006, he received a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to attend the screenwriting course at the London International Film School, where he wrote and directed Águas Mil, which was screened at several film festivals in 2009.
In 2010, he published “Foreigners and Vai Comme O Vento”. In 2016, he wrote and directed the feature film Letters from War, based on the book by Antonio Lobo Antunes, which premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival. His next film, Empire Hotel, was shot in Macau and released in 2018.
