noites

NIGHTS is set in our day (the year 2000) and focuses on the banality and brutality inherent in everyday life of a heroin addicted couple. In NIGHTS a simple story turns into a raw and chilling film, a fiction shot as a documentary, about the life of two drug addicts who have to rely on dirty tricks in order to survive.

The film portrays João and Teresa day-to-day existence, on the street, on public transport, in "Casal Ventoso" (a slum area of Lisbon), in hospitals and in the house where they squat. All the sets form a circle around the slum. It is a vicious circle: penniless characters with nothing left but their bodies and the daily tasks needed to keep them going. Within those passages through places dwell affection and friendship and the vague hope that tomorrow things will be better. They are, from the start, thrown into a sterile and empty world. In this wasteland, confronted with a precarious existence, the characters gain weight, emerge before us. João and Teresa are broken pillars of a love turned silent, intimate and painful. They share everything, which is touching - they share their home, their drugs, the hardships of their lives. As such they are accomplices. Teresa is sick. João helps her and loves her and as drug-taking helps quench the pain they stick with it.

The main theme in the film concerns the problems of addiction: the pain, the weakness, the heroin, the silence… but one might also say that they are characters in search of happiness who have made mistakes.

"Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness." Lysander Spooner in "Vices are not Crimes, A vindication of Moral Liberty" 1875