Project Silence

After five years in prison, Tony le Stéphanois meets his dearest friends Jo and the Italian Mario Ferrati and they invite Tony to steal a couple of jewels from the show-window of the famous jewelry Mappin & Webb Ltd, but he declines. Tony finds his former girlfriend Mado, who became the lover of the gangster owner of the night-club L' Âge d' Or Louis Grutter, and he humiliates her, beating on her back for being unfaithful. Then he calls Jo and Mario and proposes a burglary of the safe of the jewelry. They invite the Italian specialist in safes and elegant wolf Cesar to join their team and they plot a perfect heist. They are successful in their plan, but the Don Juan Cesar makes things go wrong when he gives a valuable ring to his mistress.

Since the 1980’s German institutions have sent adolescents to Southern Portugal to participate in experimental projects of social re-education, and our main character, Katrin, arrives in the Alentejo region of Portugal unable to establish a relationship with her new environment. The situation worsens because of the sheer emptiness of the region, the social desertification of Alentejo. Katrin plans to create a refuge in the middle of nowhere, with Julia and Pedro: in a physical and mental desert.

PORTUGUESE AFRICA, 1973. Slowly, we have plenty of time: the words of the Second Lieutenant to the small band of soldiers he commands. A land mine exploding on the forest track, the patrol lost in the forest. The death of a soldier, shots in the night. Involved in a war in which the enemy is never seen, the mud-splattered soldiers methodically carry out the final pilgrimage without bitterness or glory, the tame farewell of a generation to five centuries of Portuguese presence in Africa: a story of war.

For years our place in the universe was the subject of theologians and philosophers, but in 1960 scientist Frank Drake changed all that by using a radio telescope to search for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence.