After blowing his team’s chances at the 2018 World Cup, Portuguese soccer icon Diamantino retreats in shame to his palatial home. Bereft of purpose and desperate to atone for his act of national humiliation, he decides to adopt an African refugee youth in a naive attempt to reinject meaning into his shattered life. While awaiting the arrival of his new son, he becomes the unwitting victim of a government tax investigation, a neo-fascist plot to seize power, and the daily machinations of his cartoonishly villainous twin sisters. In their typically ribald and transgressive style, directors Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt lampoon many aspects of society in the film, from gender politics to Brexit. Combining Super-16 cinematography, lowbrow humor and an embrace of amateurism too few of their contemporaries are willing to emulate, Abrantes and Schmidt render Diamantino a lyrical satire offering a wry critique of our increasingly absurd present-day culture.

In competition for the CV Cine and New Voices New Visions Award.