About 'Autumn'
“You gotta leave home to find your way home”
In a small Portuguese town, a family's dynamic is thrown into turmoil when their son leaves to study in London. Focusing only on the school breaks when he comes back home (Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn), we observe snapshots of a daughter’s coming of age, a father's mid-life crisis, a son’s emancipation and a mother learning to cope with an "empty nest”. 'Autumn’ is an intimate, heartwarming and nuanced portrayal of family relationships, offering a poignant reflection on how we all often struggle to move on, grow up and grow old.
When parents have kids, they sacrifice a lot of things for us, and then we just leave. They spend decades turning down their friends to spend time with their kids, they put aside their wildest dreams for secure jobs for their kids, and suddenly, we are gone. Just like that, the house becomes empty and parents need to change their priorities in life and face each other for the first time in many years. And on top of that, as a person going back home, you feel you’ve changed so much when you were away that you no longer are the person they remember and suddenly they too feel very different and the connection you once had starts to fade away.