Cat's Cradle

Joana is an energetic and slightly rebellious Portuguese teenager. She often arrives late to school, likes to hang around at outdoor cafés, and she's a bit of a know-it-all. She is also the young mother of a girl whose father is in jail. Despite all the difficulties and reprimands from her parents, Joana's attitude to life remains playful. In naturalistically shot scenes, we see her picking out fake nails with her girlfriend, playing clapping games, and squealing with laughter as she makes prank phone calls to prostitutes whose numbers she finds in the newspaper. The film's title refers to a passage by Portuguese philosopher and author Agostinho da Silva: "I think that what we have, in life, is a perpetual children's game with the cat's cradle, that life presents us with a problem, we look to see what we can get out of it, then we stick our fingers in it, we go like this and something else comes out. At best, the ability we can hope to achieve is that of becoming children again, and be able to truly see how the cat's cradle turns out."