Idioma Pictures

Idioma Pictures is the Lisbon based production company of Ana Baldini and Roly Witherow, with work from 2017 to 2026 across features, shorts and experimental pieces. A film portfolio has an unusual risk: if the site has opinions about type and motion, it competes with the frames it is meant to present. The audience is festivals, programmers and collaborators, and what they want is the filmography, legibly.

I built it as a hand written static site rather than a CMS. The catalogue changes a few times a year, so a database and an admin panel would have been weight carried for nothing, and a static site means nothing to update, nothing to break and a page that opens instantly. The listing itself carries runtime and year for each production, so a programmer can scan the body of work without opening a single page.

On the site now: five productions with runtimes shown to the second and the year beside them, including one marked as coming, project pages for each, and a Portuguese and English toggle. Four items in the navigation and nothing else. A black ground and disciplined whitespace, which is the only treatment that lets a still do its own work.