Anton Tubero Indie: Film

Elena Voss (known for her 2021 micro-budget sensation The Salt in Our Bones ) Runtime: 97 minutes Language: Sparse English, with long passages of visual storytelling Budget: $450,000 (raised via Seed&Spark, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a single anonymous donor) Festival Premieres: SXSW (Narrative Spotlight), BFI London (First Feature Competition), Locarno (Winning the “Special Mention for Audiovisual Poetry”) 1. Plot Summary The film opens with a three-minute static shot: a hand, cracked with age and dried clay, slowly shaping a hollow, eyeless head on a potter’s wheel. This is ANTON TUBERO (Joaquim de Almeida, in a career-defining silent performance). He lives in a crumbling lighthouse on the Portuguese coast, his only companions hundreds of fired clay figures—soldiers, lovers, animals—each with a distinct expression. He speaks to no one. Instead, he writes notes on shards of pottery or gestures to his sculptures, which he animates in stop-motion sequences that intercut his reality.

Logline: In a sun-bleached, near-silent coastal town, a reclusive ceramicist who speaks only through his clay figures must confront the ghost of his estranged twin brother when a curious young archivist arrives to document his “extinct” art form. Anton Tubero Indie Film

Enter CATARINA (Nina Suárez), a 24-year-old graduate student from Lisbon. Her thesis is on “anemo-aesthetic traditions”—art made in response to sea winds. She arrives with a digital recorder and a stack of old letters, claiming that Anton’s late twin, LUÍS (also de Almeida, in flashback and ghost form), was her grandmother’s lost love. Elena Voss (known for her 2021 micro-budget sensation