Telenovelas

Cacau is a fearless and irreverent young chocolatier who lives on a farm in Itacaré, Bahia, with her Portuguese parents, Quim and Filo, who are trusted by the wealthy owner, Justino. Cacau has a dream of getting an international diploma in chocolate making, but she can’t afford it. Everything changes when her father, in order not to cut off her wings, breaks a pact from the past and reveals his true identity, leading Justino to discover that he had a daughter with another woman. The revelation unleashes a series of intrigues and conflicts that put the blood family’s heritage at risk, as Cacau becomes a threat to the other heiresses. This is a moving story that delves into the complexity of family relationships and how they can be affected by past secrets and blood ties.

Queridos Papás is about new forms of fatherhood. Four men meet at their children’s nursery school and share their experiences as fathers in a world made up mostly of mothers.
Xavier, Matias, Simão and Jaime are young, attractive and up-to-date fathers. Each of them has a son and a daughter in kindergarten.
Xavier is about to separate from Alice (Jaime’s sister). The couple has three children and Alice leaves her husband for a woman. Xavier is devastated, until another woman comes into his life: Iris, who is going to help him get over the divorce and bet on love again. All this with unexpected consequences, because she is his father’s girlfriend.
Jaime has been married twice and has a son from each marriage. His current wife desperately wants to have another baby, but he is not ready for that. His dilemma is whether to be a father again or to be alone.
Matias is single and has just found out that he has a child. Used to living alone, his newfound fatherhood will force him to confront his origins and to discover secrets about his own father.
Simon is recently widowed and is not ready to fall in love again until he meets Silvia, a kindergarten teacher. However, she has her own problems

Festa é Festa tells the story of a village lost in time (like so many others in Portugal) and that this year is getting ready for the biggest and best village festival ever because it’s the 100th birthday of the village’s greatest benefactor. So everybody wants to shine at this festival, with their eyes on the old woman’s inheritance, and sparing no effort (as they’ve been doing for over 20 years, but the old woman just won’t die…). In Lisbon, the old woman’s impoverished son (a social climber and somewhat of a snob) has a plan to send his daughter (the old woman’s great-granddaughter) to the village so that she can build a relationship with the old woman, but with the excuse that his daughter is going there to recover from an unhappy love affair. And this is when this cosmopolitan, high-tech young woman from Lisbon, who is rather arrogant, ends up in this backwater against her will, with no 5G, cable TV, etc. Things are not looking good, but in the middle of it all, she falls in love with a young villager, who knows little or nothing about the world outside the village. In other words, two people from two completely different and opposing worlds. This young man is the son of the president of the parish council. Who is also the president of the festival committee. And the president of the local social club. And the football club. And a gravedigger. Basically, everything. A peacock who thinks he’s lord of the village. Everything his son criticizes and doesn’t want for himself. This is how, in such a typical Portuguese village, as they prepare as far in advance as possible for the festival of the year (there will be TV coverage and reporting by TVI), two young people from completely different worlds will experience love, proving that, in almost everything in life, the beauty of things lies in their simplicity…

Quero é viver is the tender and amusing story of Ana and her four daughters who, after their 70-year-old mother ends her marriage of 50 years, will also end up turning their own lives around completely. Ana is 70 years old and she still cares for Sérgio, but she wants a divorce and refuses to explain why. Sérgio wants to stay married because he loves Ana… Some say that there was a time when Sérgio liked other women too, but he only really cares about Ana and rumors can be painful so it’s better to forget them. But Ana doesn’t agree: there are things that hurt even if they’re not spoken about, so they are real. And having to give up her career as an actress when she got married, because of Sérgio, is something she isn’t happy about… and she likes to believe that, if she can’t go back and change things, she can at least to things differently in the future. Ana really loves life! Natália, Irene, Maria and Olga love their parents, Ana and Sérgio, but they’re not happy about Ana wanting to get divorced, particularly without explaining why. The four sisters are in agreement: nobody gets divorced after 50 years of marriage… much less their own parents, and on the day of the golden anniversary. Natália cares for her husband, Frederico, despite the patronizing way he treats her and, coincidentally, she’s now interested in Ana’s psychologist too, who she was fond of before she got married. She was very fond of him indeed. And he of her. Irene cares for Santiago, her husband (who used to care deeply for her), but she doesn’t like it that he’s taking the credit for all her hard work in his father’s advertising agency and she certainly won’t like it when she discovers that he’s cheating on her with a younger woman and, even worse, one he is very much in love with. Maria likes the perfection of her long marriage, particularly after having a drink or two and momentarily forgetting that José Luís, her husband, is no longer attracted to her and spends long hours at work. José Luís cares for Maria… but maybe he likes men too, at least he might like Fábio… Basically, José Luís would prefer it was only Maria he cared for, but life isn’t made up of good things alone. Olga likes being in love and being free to stop being in love. At the moment, she’s seeing one of her brothers-in-law. She doesn’t like it, but she can’t help herself. Sometimes she thinks it’s the fault of her ex-husband, Rodrigo, who pursues her with tenderness and affection and wants them to get back together. To sum up, Olga doesn’t like not being able to love.

Rua das Flores tells the story of a street somewhere in Lisbon district that could be the same as so many others but that isn’t the same as any of them. This is because it’s a street where all the women have the names of flowers. Starting with the most important figure on the street: Tília. Tília is a fortune teller. She discovered her gift at an early age, but only started using it later on. She doesn’t force her work on anybody, but everybody on the street seeks her out, although nobody will admit it. Out of shame, but also because nobody wants to really believe in Tília’s prophecies (particularly when they’re not good)… but, in all honesty, they always come true. And it’s precisely because of one of these prophecies coming true that our story begins. After that, everybody on Rua das Flores begins believing that Tília is, in fact, a real fortune teller. And it’s this “new” information that will create upheaval on Rua das Flores because now, more than ever, everybody living there will have to deal with everything Tília predicted for their futures, which will all be revealed throughout the story and that will be as unexpected as it is troubling… But Rua das Flores is much more than just Tília. It’s also an unusual street because a building is being constructed at one end of it and this will turn it into a dead end street. Because of a building that nobody knows the owner of or what it’s going to be used for in the future. At the moment, Rua das Flores is what you could call a micro-city within the city. It has everything the people need so they don’t have to leave it at all. It could be considered a model street, if it weren’t for the kind of people living there. Because not a day goes by on Rua das Flores without plenty of confusion, inside and outside the homes of the people living and working there. And things are only going to get worse when they find out about the disappearance of the notebook where Tília wrote down the predictions, past and future, she made for all of them when they used to seek her out in secret.
In other words, there’s panic on Rua das Flores!

Pedro Valente is an enigmatic man. Nobody knows anything about his family, friends or his past. He grew up in Lisbon with Elias, a young priest who found him at the door of the church, very far away from where he was born, in the beautiful Minho region. But why would a mother, who had money, judging from the boy’s clothes, abandon her son like that? This was a mystery Elias tried to uncover. And he did, but when he found out the truth, he ended up keeping it a secret. Pedro falls in love with Clara Sampaio de Menezes, who was born to a conservative family belonging to the old Minho nobility. Clara’s father, Bento de Menezes, is violently against the relationship. To prove to his daughter that Pedro wasn’t worthy of her, he set a trap that proved to be fatal. Bento instigated a fight between Pedro and a colleague. During the fight, Pedro’s adversary slipped off the top of the building, falling to his death. Pedro fled, without explaining what had happened to Clara, who is heartbroken. She returned home and became a teacher in the beautiful town of Soajo. Many years later, Pedro finds a clue to the family that abandoned him and sets out for Braga. Father Elias is alarmed and goes north with him, but in the search for the reason he was abandoned, the unthinkable happens and Pedro comes face to face with his childhood sweetheart. But, ironically, Clara is engaged to his brother, Lourenço Novais. His family own a network of private clinics, run by the mother of both of them, Antónia. To get closer to Clara and separate her from Lourenço, Pedro comes up with a scheme to invest in the clinics, encircling Lourenço and Antónia, reaching a limit that makes Father Elias step in and tell him that Antónia is his mother. The shock of the discovery is huge and what Pedro wants most of all is to understand why he was abandoned. But his blind search will lead him to hide his real reasons from Clara, and he could end up losing her. So, Pedro will have to choose between the woman he loves and his own identity.

Maria Rita lives in Serra da Estrela with her grandfather, Honório, a shepherd and small cheese producer, who is on the verge of bankruptcy. She grew up on the mountain, free. She’s a tomboy, and very genuine, sometimes disconcertingly so. She loves her life but everything is at risk of falling apart. One day, David Quintela, a lawyer from Aveiro, brings a message from a man claiming to be her father. Maria Rita doesn’t believe him at first, but her grandfather confirms that that man, Henrique Trindade de Sousa, a well-known businessman who is in jail for defrauding the company he owns, is in fact her father. Maria Rita ends up visiting her father. He tells her he had to abandon her mother when she was pregnant because he was married. He says he’s innocent of what he’s being accused of now and wants to make up for the mistakes of the past. He wants Maria Rita to take her rightful place in the family and claim her rights. If she does, he’ll help her grandfather, saving him from ruin. Maria Rita is faced with a dilemma. She despises that man, but she needs to help her grandfather. When her grandfather falls ill, she agrees and moves to the home of her new family in Aveiro, where everything is new and strange, but she faces up to things resourcefully, leaving everybody baffled. This is where she meets Mercedes, her father’s wife, a stressed-out socialite who is dealing very badly with the whole issue. And Vera, her older sister, who’s dating David, the lawyer. Maria Rita and David have butted heads since the beginning, but their attraction is bubbling under the surface and the first one to notice this is Vera, who becomes her rival for a variety of reasons: her new sister is a threat to her inheritance and her relationship with David. The matriarch, Henrique’s mother, is pained by her son’s imprisonment and is convinced that he’s innocent, but she’s not willing to accept an illegitimate granddaughter and she doesn’t know why Henrique sent for Maria Rita.

Some people are willing to give their life, or their lifetime, to save another, because they love too much… That’s Zeca, the main character. A person gifted with values, with an enormous sense of justice, who doesn’t always choose the expected path to help those he loves, but who never has any doubts as to his priority: protecting his own. That’s how he ends up in prison, when he agrees to plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit in order to save his mother’s life. Because he loves too much, Zeca gives up his own freedom, as well as Ema’s love for him. When he realizes he was deceived and that his sacrifice was in vain, instead of rebelling, he is resilient. And he gets ready for the day of his big clash: the moment when he will be able to get justice for everything that happened. Zeca stays in jail for another 15 years, but when he gets out, he’s determined to discover who it was that betrayed him. He wants justice for the lost years, but he also wants to prove his innocence. He wants the right to start afresh, with a clean record. And it doesn’t matter if he has to do something he shouldn’t along the way: he’s already served his sentence. A man who knows exactly what he wants, without this making him cold, calculating or incapable of feeling or loving…

Vitória, a young girl from the Ribatejo who loves animals and falconry, has her life turned upside down on the day she’s raped and sees the murder of her father. Fearful of being killed too, and wanting to forget everything that happened, Vitória flees to Lisbon, firmly vowing never again to return to her native land. But, as life takes many twists and turns, Vitória returns to the family home of her attackers 14 years later. She is the nurse and physical therapist for the mother of those men, Catarina, who’s recovering from a stroke. Although she can be harsh, Catarina, the matriarch of the Santa Cruz family, is taken by Vitória’s kindness and dedication. She will do anything for her, until the moment that she realizes that her life could jeopardize the lives or her own sons. Carlos, the foreman at Herdade do Cruzeiro, the estate belonging to the Santa Cruz family, and Vitória’s boyfriend when they were teenagers, recognizes her immediately, despite the major physical and psychological changes she has undergone. After finding out what happened 14 years before, Carlos sets out to discover the whole truth, with a single condition: he won’t take part in vendettas. Meanwhile, Vitória will be constantly surprised at what she’s capable of doing to avenge the death of her father and how a recent, but intense, love affair allows her to resume the normal course of her life, which was virtually on hold since the rape. As a result of her past, this character will do many distasteful things but, in all honesty, it will be difficult not to sympathize with her, despite her circuitous route, as she conquers her fears and her enemies.