2 AM * 2015
ESAD - Escola Superior de Artes e Design (Porto, Portugal)

2 AM is a short film produced at ESAD (Escola Superior de Artes e Design) that distills a late-night bar encounter into a tight, noir-tinged rupture of reality.

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António Baía Reis acts in the film alongside Diana Lopes Moreira and Bruno Pinto. The premise is deceptively simple: a woman, a man, and a Belgian beer at 2 a.m., a casual scene that begins to glitch. As the night folds in on itself, time and space stop behaving like stable coordinates, and the banal becomes charged with menace. What starts as flirtation and small talk turns into a spiral of disorientation, repetition, and inevitability, until the story snaps into violence.

 

Directed by Mafalda Pontes and Mariana Pereira, 2 AM plays like an academic exercise with an auteur pulse: minimal elements, controlled tension, and a structural twist that uses the bar as a liminal stage where desire, suspicion, and fate collide. The soundtrack, anchored by B.B. King and Miles Davis, adds a bruised, nocturnal elegance to the film’s shifting mood.

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Credits:

Direction: Mafalda Pontes, Mariana Pereira
Cast: António Baía Reis, Diana Lopes Moreira, Bruno Pinto
Production: Maria João Dias, Filipa Vilares
Cinematography: Gil Corujeira
Art Direction: Flora
Script: Bruno Pinto, Mafalda Pontes, Mariana Pereira, Tiago Machado
Academic project (2015): ESAD - Narrativas Multimédia & Produção Audiovisual (Teacher: Carlos Amaral)