The Portuguese House

What determines our identity? The place where we grow up, the place where we live, our genes, customs, experiences, our desires... And is this identity unique and unchanging? Are we the same person if we radically change our context?

One of the pillars of identity is place, understood as a whole that is not solely geographical, but is also made up of the elements and people that inhabit it. Place as what gives shape to a life. Place as home. We talk about the place where you feel at home, where you can be yourself. A place you can stop running away from things. A place that has nothing to do with roots, but instead is about discovery. There’s a curious similarity between our emotional attachments to other people and the relationships we form with the places where we live. There are places we only pass through, places we quickly forget, places in which we stay for years and then leave...

This search for a place is linked to the search for identity. The characters in this film are looking for a new identity by impersonating someone else, by assuming an identity that does not belong to them. And yet, through this impersonation, they succeed in constructing a reality of their own, in building a life.