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Darya Films is a Film & TV production company based in Lisbon, Portugal, founded in 2018 by Greek-Portuguese producer, director & writer Paolo Marinou-Blanco and Portuguese producer Filipa Vala. Darya Films specializes in developing and producing projects that engage with important or controversial social and political issues seen through personal & original perspectives, yet are still accessible to a wide range of audiences.

We work on genres ranging from dark comedy to political thriller and historical drama, striving to bridge different cultures and prioritize projects created by women and new voices under-represented in the national filmmaking and television landscape. In 2020 we produced “Empty Hands”, a Portugal/Spain coproduction (Curtas Vila do Conde IFF, San Francisco IFF, Izmir IFF, Provincetown IFF, Badajoz IFF, among others), and in 2023 “Dreaming of Lions”, a dark comedy about the controversial issue of euthanasia, a Portugal/Brazil/Spain coproduction with funding from ICA (Portugal), ANCINE (Brazil), ICAA (Spain), Ibermedia and Eurimages. The script was selected for the Torino Film Lab – Comedy, San Francisco Film Society Rainin Grant, MFI Script2Film, Crossroads Agora Coproduction Market and premiered at Tallinn Black Nights IFF in 2024, will have its theatrical release in 2025, distributed by NOS in Portugal and Pandora in Brazil. 

Other film projects currently in pre-production include “From Guiné”, winner of the Hubert Bals Fund, the second feature by Brazilian writer-director Caroline Leone, whose debut film “A Window to Rosália” won the FIPRESCI prize at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the documentary “What Will We Do About Fatima Roque?”, a documentary exploring the Angolan Civil War through a deeply personal and woman-centered perspective. Our television projects currently in pre-production include a TV Mini-Series based on the feature film “Dreaming of Lions”,  for Portuguese national broadcaster RTP to be broadcast in late 2026, and “Gaia”, a cross-border political thriller about the controversial issue of GMOs in the European Union.