Best movies like The Courtyard of the Ballads

Six friends meet every evening in a basement to make music. During the daytime, however, there are no rehearsals for what life brings us. Each endeavour leaves its mark. Rita left Ricardo, Rafael found her, but she still feels lost. Eduardo thought he no longer liked Maria, but after what he has done he cannot turn the clock back. João lacks the courage to breakup with his girlfriend and takes refuge in the song he is writing for Inês. Marco struggles to get another young man’s love, but he is under no illusions. Samuel believes in everlasting love but something is wrong because his friends haven’t heard from him for sometime. Inês, attempting to feel safe, likes to experiment and she's waiting to see how things go with João. With all this going on, how could the band not be falling apart...?

In this Oscar-winning short film, Norman McLaren employs the principles normally used to put drawings or puppets into motion to animate live actors. The story is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower.

Raimund Gregorius, having saved a beautiful Portuguese woman from leaping to her death, stumbles upon a mesmerizing book by a Portuguese author, which compels him to suddenly abandon the boring life he has led for years and to embark on an enthralling adventure. In search of the author, Gregorius acts as detective, pulling together pieces of a puzzle that involves political and emotional intrigue and the highest possible stakes. His voyage is one that transcends time and space, delving into the realms of history, medicine and love, all in search of true meaning to his life.

After a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby’s safety to the troubled, deadbeat father, whose violent actions take the viewer on a tour of the foreboding, crumbling shantytown in which they live.

Lisbon, 1989. A middle-aged poor man, tormented by an illness, lives in a cheap room in a family boarding house, in the old section of the city's waterfront.

After the Portuguese government demolishes his slum and relocates him to a housing project on the outskirts of Lisbon, 75-year-old Cape Verde immigrant Ventura wanders between his new and old homes, reconnecting with people from his past.

A guerilla leader falls in love with a mysterious woman in World War II Lisbon.

A nightclub star helps trap an enemy agent on the trail of an American newsman.

An unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but taking as main focus the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte.

For Capt. Robert John Evans, smuggling black-market goods is nothing out of the ordinary. But one day he's hired by Aristides Mavros for a more involved assignment -- sneaking an imprisoned American out of communist-controlled territory. The job seems challenging enough, but when he meets the prisoner's sultry wife, Sylvia, he realizes his mission comes with a startling catch: Not only must he rescue this man, he must bring him back from the dead.

Lisbon Story is Wim Wenders' homage to Lisbon and films. A sound engineer obtains a mysterious postcard from a friend who at the moment is filming a film in Lisbon. He sets out across Europe to find him and help him.

Lisbon, Portugal, 2010. Pilar, a pious woman devoted to social causes, maintains a peculiar relationship with her neighbor Aurora, a temperamental old woman obsessed with gambling who lives tormented by a mysterious past.

A touching and tragic real life story about a group of Portuguese fishermen who get caught in the middle of a storm in the Tejo river (Lisbon) and struggle to survive.

Based on a true story, Jason and Shirley recreates the 1966 power struggle between Jewish, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Shirley Clarke and her subject, Jason Holiday, a fierce black gay queen over a 12-hour marathon filming session which gave rise to Clarke's iconic documentary Portrait of Jason.

Laura lives in the country with her considerably older husband. When Nuno, her brother who study in Lisbon, pays a visit, he realizes that his sister does not have a happy life. He initiates a friendship with a worker on the farm. The circumstances turn Laura and Nuno against each other... Portrays the repressed sexuality and homosexual desire in a rural setting and elliptically and delicately the small farming community that serves as the backdrop for the impossible relationships pursued by Laura and her brother.

A baby is kidnapped in a Brazilian airport. Years later, the mother lives in Lisbon and works in a strip-tease bar so she can survive. When she is fired, she joins a gang of bank robbers...

A loner, narcissistic and suicidal teenager attracts most of the people he meets like a fatal aura, a black light. He falls deeply in love with Teresa but does she exist or is she a mere figment, an image, a reflection? Teresa is an apparition. A pretext for an amoral violent uprising, for doomed love.

Which language shall we use to tell the stories we have been told? In which language shall we write a declaration of love? Lisbon, Bairro das Colónias, third floor. Conveying and translating an insightful encounter between different worlds, Fatumata and Aissato, mother and daughter, discuss love and the happiness. Their feelings have been determined by narratives and languages acquired at different stages of life and in different places. At 7pm, from the third to the fifth floor, where I live, a regular sound, always the same, like the beating of a heart, reverberates through the building.

Fed up with the sea, Paul, a Swiss mechanic working in the noisy bowels of a merchant ship, lands in Lisbon.

This exaggerated mockery of crime cinema tells the story of a gang lead by "Renato, o pacíficio" (Renato, the peaceful) and their attempt to steal precious jewels from the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. The weapon of choice? Bees!

Film biography dwelling on the hectic artistic life of António Variações, a famous Portuguese pop rock singer from the 80s, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1984.

Peace in the fictional Portuguese village Curral de Moinas is disturbed when Quim discovers he had a father who left him a huge inheritance with a bank, the prestigious BLOW-ME (Bank of Loans Over Worth-Market Exchange). So the two friends Quim and Zé head for Lisbon and start living a life of luxury, drinking bubbled wine and cars with more than 20 horse power engines. But money and the big city corrupt Quim... Will their friendship resist the challenge? Will Quim be able to manage BLOW-ME when he can't even sort out the change at a grocery store? Is the night life in Cascais ready for Zé's single eyebrow? Lisbon will never be the same...

A New age remake of a portguese classic, Pátio das Cantigas shows the lives of a neighbourhood in the Old Lisbon, including their desires, happiness and sadness, always with a good humour.

Anastácio lives in Lisbon and is fanatic for Sporting, one of the city's football teams. When the team travels to face Porto, he follows it with the family, staying in house of his friend, Mr. Barata, pretending to be rich.

Vasco is a medical student in Lisbon, supported by his rich aunts, whom he had falsely told he had already graduated. In fact, he devotes himself to a bohemian life, preferring the popular fairs and pretty women, especially Alice, a seamstress from the Castelinhos quarter, which rather upsets her ambitious father, tailor Caetano, who is familiar with Vasco's debts. After failing yet another final exam, he is surprised by his aunts' announcement that they will visit him in Lisbon to see his practice.

Geninha and Fortunato are couple who loves music. He's a good songwriter, she sings well. Despite this, their parents hate each other and do not seem willing to allow their marriage, nor the creation of a local radio for them.

The film is set in Lisbon, and tells the story of a day in the life of Rita and Paulo, a Portuguese young couple of the 90's. The fast changing city around them makes them wish to break with all traditions and live the day the get married (only civil marriage) like it is an ordinary day.

Lisbon, early 1940s. The neutral port town is an open door to freedom, for those who are escaping the Nazi occupied France and eastern European countries, and a war field for spies of every description. Lisbon became a cosmopolitan town, where the Duke of Windsor, Primo de Rivera, Pola Negri, Leslie Howard, Walter Schellenberg and Juan Garcia are often together in the luxury hotels and night-clubs. Espionage and crime go hand in hand, despite of, or encouraged by, the Portuguese secret police.

Ana Maria loves a modest guitar player, Júlio; when she herself in a 'retiro' (typical fado tavern), public and critics rend major applause. Fame brings about new friends, namely bohemian young who play and sing the fado with her, and not so young men but who rich and powerful enough to patronize her, promote her, and wish to become intimate with her. Júlio the guitarist feel betrayed, and he sets his mind to depart to the African colonies, to leave her forever. Knowing that he's going to embark, Ana Maria's heart between her first love, and the appeal of the rich and famous.

The great fadista, Amelia Rodrigues, made her screen debut in Capas Negras, which took its name from the black capes worn by the students in the university city of Coimbra, where the film is set. The action begins in a tavern where a group of former students are reminiscing about their time at the university. One of the students, Jose Duarte then breaks into song, performing an impromptu fado in the local Coimbra style. The tavern owner's niece, the aptly named Maria Lisboa promptly retaliates with a fado of the Lisbon variety. The melodramatic plot then centers on the frustrated romance between these two characters, and the soundtrack is essentially a musical duel between these two different styles of Portugal's national song.

In an imaginary future, Portugal consists of an association of states - North and South - with zones of specific influence. City under vigilance, Lisbon is inhabited by a repressed and militarized population. Maria and António stand out in this city and surrender themselves to a submersive love. 1978

Lisbon by night, through the eyes of a young woman who lives freely, and a neighbour who follows her everywhere, from a distance.

Falacha is the captain of a fishing boat of Nazaré who lost part of his men in a shipwreck. Among them was the husband of Aunt Aurélia, who holds Falacha responsible for this tragedy. A few years later, Maria, Falacha's daughter, falls in love with Manuel, Aurélia's son, which makes the two young people the new Romeo and Juliet. As for Falacha, he succumbs to social pressure and a tragic fate...

In the future, Joseph enters a bookshop searching for an Italian writer. While he searches for the name "Firenze" in the database, he recounts the story of a woman he had met 30 years ago. Lisbon, 2007: Joseph is a tormented American seminarian, a member of Opus Dei, who has come to Lisbon to help organize an exhibition of the Franciscan Order in Lisbon's Cathedral. The exhibition brings to Portugal a legendary mirror, "The Mirror of St. Francis of Assisi", that was said to have allowed St Francis to see the next morning. On the day of his departure, Joseph, at the train station, literally bumps into Giulia, a beautiful and irreverent Italian writer with whom he establishes an immediate chemistry. Giulia tells Joseph she came to Lisbon to try to find a mysterious Portuguese singer who her father had a relationship with in Lisbon before he left to fight for the Portuguese in their colonial war.