Requiem

Paul, a writer and narrator, arrives in Lisbon on an exceptionally hot summer Sunday with a strange appointment: he is to meet the ghost of the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Paul soon realizes that he has mixed up the time. He is expected at midnight, but it is only noon, and he decides to wander through the city. During his drifting journey from noon to midnight, Paul encounters a gallery of characters drawn from both the present and the past. Some are alive: restaurant owners, a brothel madam, a taxi driver, a cemetery caretaker, and an old gypsy woman. Others are ghosts: his deceased father, his friend Pierre, and Isabel, a woman he once loved. The boundaries between reality and dream, life and death, present and memory gradually dissolve through these encounters. Ultimately, Paul's quest leads to his nocturnal meeting with the ghost of Pessoa, in a poetic, melancholic, and introspective atmosphere, where Lisbon becomes a stage for memories and reflections on art, life, and regret.